HOW IT WORKS

We help you to identify, secure and then maintain your ideal lifestyle throughout retirement.

THE CLEARER™ WEALTH MANAGEMENT PROCESS

Our unique CLEARER™ wealth management model, has been proven to work for hundreds of client familes

The 7 step wealth management model

Our CLEARER™ wealth management model, as featured in The Times, The Telegraph and the Mail on Sunday, is an award-winning financial process

The first step in our CLEARER™ model discusses life goals and aspirations. It’s important to identify what matters most and decipher what exactly it is we are looking to achieve through financial planning. The next stage see us work on the number – the amount of money needed in order to secure a lifestyle and retirement without compromise.

With clear, prioritised goals, and that all-important number, we deliver honest and realistic recommendations that get us where we need to be. We look at making the most of annual allowances, building contingency plans, and slashing excessive investment costs and we ultimately take steps to protect legacies for family. We also plan around our clients’ businesses to ensure they continue to function if key shareholders or directors pass and factor in any businesses that exist within our succession planning.

THE 10 POINT INVESTMENT PLAN

Martin Wilcocks started at Barclays in 1989. What follows is a 10-point summary of what we believe works from an investing perspective, with the benefit of over three decades of experience…

We are investment advisers, not investment forecasters, speculators, or crystal ball readers. We don’t believe anybody can successfully predict investment markets or returns continuously, nor will they ever be able to outperform equity markets on a consistent and repeatable basis.

Exposure to the entire developed world and emerging world equity markets, as opposed to fixed income markets – even during retirement years, is a must. Get this one thing right on its own, and we stand a chance of seeing the money outlive us. Get it wrong, and we will likely outlive the money.

Fixed income as an asset class used to work in the 70s and 80s when people tended to retire at 65 and live until 75. Nowadays, it’ll never get us through a three-decade retirement, and if relying on fixed income to get us through retirement, we will, in our opinion, outlive the money. Backing a fixed income retirement plan, in a rising cost world, is the ultimate financial suicide plan on installments.

Small-cap equity and value-cap equity exposure, alongside main market large-cap equity exposure, again diversified throughout the entire developed and emerging world will continue to be essential and give us exposure to higher expected returns over time.

We trust the various equity markets we deploy to do their work, and all the evidence we have found points towards this combined strategy winning over pure ‘actively managed’ alternatives that are found to fail in over 80% of cases (supported by the University of London Business School), Vanguard, Dimensional Fund Advisors, and over 25000 academic papers to date.

The key elements we deploy offer exposure to all groups and classes of equities throughout both the developed and emerging world, giving you the broad asset, sector, and geographic diversification to capture returns from all markets that ebb and flow over time.

Keeping overall costs to around 1.50% per annum – such that the fee drag on investment growth is relatively low is important, because, by way of an example, a 1% additional fee on £250k (whether it’s in a pension, an ISA, or a general investment account), broadly speaking, can see the same £250k taken from the portfolio in fees over a 30-year retirement in that 1% alone when compounded.

Not selling out, and keeping calm when the markets tank, as they always have, and always will, every 7 years or so. Whilst everyone else’s behaviour is, or certainly shows form, for being erratic, you must stay calm because the falls have always been temporary and the advance permanent. Do not ‘throw the portfolio overboard’. Ever.

And in fact, instead of mass panic, you will be doubling up on any regular contributions or investing further lump sums of capital into our globally diversified equity model when the markets do tank, as much as possible, for further buy-in whilst ‘prices’ are low. And because you will be buying more when prices are low, you will even beat the fund managers we deploy at their own game.

In our opinion, that’s pretty much all it takes to make and then keep people wealthy. It’s then a case of managing behaviour, and safe income withdrawal to support retirement income needs as the years unfold, whilst keeping an eye on inflation and keeping the faith in what we started.