Traditionally the role of a financial adviser has been to help you grow your financial resources. This has evolved significantly in more recent times into a much broader role, as financial planners have developed the skills and the tools to provide a lot more value than this. Sitting at the heart of what we do now is helping you to identify the life that you want to live, and then through careful financial planning, guiding you on your financial journey to ensure you achieve your goals and dreams.

As part of our financial planning conversations with you, we always bring the attention around to subjects that are not easy to think about – a serious illness or death visiting a family member or indeed yourself. We all naturally don’t want to spend too long thinking about this, but unfortunately for us to do our job properly it’s a subject that we simply must contemplate.

We’d like to share a story with you that originated back in 1963 when published by the German writer, Heinrich Böll. It’s a very short story, but perfectly captures one of the key messages that we stress with our clients.

Well there is no exhaustive list for this one – there really are so many potential factors that can influence your investment returns. When you ask a professional investor, they will often jump to factors such as the economy, sentiment and interest rates. All very relevant factors.