As a business we tend to get approached quite often with ‘investment opportunities’ for our clients which superficially look quite attractive.  I have an almost instant reaction to these message when they hit my email or linkedin inbox….I delete the message promoting these ‘opportunities’ almost immediately.

Whilst you could argue that we could be depriving our clients the opportunity to invest in these opportunities by dismissing them almost immediately….I would absolutely disagree.  On the majority of occasions these type of investments tend to be in relatively specialist, high risk sectors and tend to be untested over the longer term.  Therefore by discounting these investments I feel I’m protecting my clients from the latest ‘flavour of the month’.

When we look at investing on behalf of our clients we tend to take a traditional approach.  We ensure that we take a lot of time understand their plans, goals, hopes and needs.  We then take the time to understand our clients attitude to investment risk (as well as how they feel about loss on their investments).  We can then build them a portfolio of investments, with a mixture of different assets designed based on their thoughts.

It’s also important that we consider the tax situation of our clients and ensure that we can legally reduce their tax liability.  This is normally done in conjunction with the clients accountant but we avoid recommending the ‘schemes’ which make promises to mitigate huge amounts of tax, instead focussing on the tried and tested methods (like maximising pension contributions and utilising the clients tax efficient allowances like ISA’s).

It’s a topical subject at the moment (er, did someone say Jimmy Carr?).  But again, you could argue that by considering some of the more complex tax mitigation schemes out there we could potentially save our clients thousands of pounds in tax.  However many of these type of schemes are aggressive in their approach, incredibly complex, potentially expensive to administer, and may be liable to being shut down in the future by the HMRC. As a business we would rather ensure that our clients sleep well at night safe in the knowledge that they won’t need to concern themselves with a potential tax liability in the future.

We appreciate the fact that some people out there will be looking to invest in the ‘next big thing’ or looking to potentially aggressively mitigate tax, and we do not expect to be able to help these clients.  However the clients we do look after appreciate the fact that we can provide them with a peace of mind that their money is being managed sensibly.