Our Investment Advice Service

A Warm Welcome

We enjoy the opportunity to take a rounded, life-long, approach to financial advice, especially investment advice, taking into account each client’s family life, hopes, and aspirations, as well as their financial situation. Our aim is to give you the confidence that all your financial planning needs have been put in place, leaving you to get on and enjoy the lifestyle you have been preparing for.

Here are a few questions to check your total peace of mind and the lifestyle you deserve:

Are you making the best use of any spare capital or surplus income?
Are you being tax efficient?
Are you saving for specific objectives and goals, such as retirement, house deposit, school or university fees, marriage, etc?

Our investment advice service aims to build your portfolio in the style that is most suited to you.

Our Investment Advice

We try to help you create wealth, to achieve the standard of living for when you do not want to work so hard, making the most of tax-efficient investment opportunities, so that money is available when you want to spend it.

To give you all-round investment advice we look at platforms and products (the wrappers or ‘pots’ that you hold your investments in) and the assets (the underlying investment holdings), matching them to your personal circumstances, needs, objectives, and thoughts on investment risk.

When we give investment advice, we will talk through with you how soon you need to get your money back. Time frames vary for different goals and will affect the type of risks you can take on. For example:

If you’re saving for a house deposit and hoping to buy in a couple of years, investments such as shares or funds will not be suitable because their value goes up or down.
Over the long term, investments other than cash savings accounts tend to give you a better chance of beating inflation and reaching your pension goal.

Most people want to make the most of their hard-earned money and savings, whether it be to provide a pension, an additional income to meet planned expenditure, or simply as an emergency fund for unforeseen circumstances. It is well worth getting investment advice if these key changes in life happen because they have financial and tax implications;

going through a divorce
getting married or remarried
looking to leave a legacy
wanting to invest a windfall
planning for retirement
repaying your interest-only mortgage
needing to raise funds
doing some intergenerational planning
wanting to know you have leading ISA and savings account rates

Our independent investment advice can confidently cover all these situations, and a lot more!

Investment Advice and Risk of Loss

No investment advice service would be sensible without taking into account your attitude to investment risk and capacity for investment loss. We will make certain that we understand your investment profile – the risks you are willing to take to achieve gains vs any potential losses you are prepared to accept. Just as importantly are the risks you are not prepared to take or losses you are not prepared to accept - after all who plans for a pension only to find it isn't sufficient.

We balance these needs carefully. In this way, we can deliver a well-diversified range of investment advice to match your attitude to risk.

We recommend spreading investments across different types of investments and take account of any economic factors both in the UK as well as internationally.

Our role when giving investment advice is to explain any of the terms so that you understand them and can make a financial plan with confidence.

It's important to understand a few things about how investment and risk work. It’s a fact, in my opinion, millions of investors take far more risk with their investments than they need to. Money can be invested in the wrong places, money loses its value (and over the years just imagine how many billions have been lost in poor performing and risky investments, marketed by the financial services industry as being the next bright star).

In my opinion, every client deserves peace of mind, particularly in today’s volatile investment markets. So my recommendations are based on where you are now and where you want to be – not just how much financial pain you can take from losses – but realistic, achievable, investment returns – based on what you need, before looking at the possible risks to the recommendation.

If you found out through a professional lifestyle financial planner that you can afford to live on returns of 2% per annum why would you take a higher risk? Why not just create a low risk, low cost, widespread, tax-efficient, portfolio to give you confidence, financial independence, and peace of mind.

What if you discovered you would never run out of money to meet your expenditure plans – why take any financial risk at all?

When you know what your financial future looks like you start to understand what level of return you really need, and only then consider the investment risk you need to take and are prepared for (risk is, after all, a measure of the pain you are prepared to take). It’s a catastrophe to invest in anything you don’t really need, which do things you didn’t expect. That’s financial stress, it's costly and deeply troubling if financial advisers haven’t taken the time and trouble to understand their client’s true needs.

One myth to dispel for those that don't think investment advice is needed – whatever your friends or family etc say, in the golf club, the pub, or anywhere else, they might tell you a lot about their successes… did they spend the same time telling you about their losses? Another myth – how many times have they sold at a low price (when the markets are down) and bought at a high price (when the markets are expensive) – not the best investment strategy since it leads to financial disaster!

My aim is to make sure my clients are having fun, enjoying their precious life, not worrying or being distracted by the financial press or the goings-on in the stock market.

The value of investments can fall as well as rise.
You may get back less than you invested.

Photo of Emma Francis, Office Manager, for Chestnut Financial Services Limited

Please Get In Touch

We always look forward to speaking with our clients.

You can telephone our office on 01522 788887.

Or you can email us - our address is ian@chestnutfs.co.uk

The guidance and/or advice contained within this website is subject to the UK regulatory regime, and is therefore targeted at consumers based in the UK.

Chestnut Financial Services Limited. Registered in England no 9918363. Registered office: 10 Newark Road, Bassingham, LN5 9HA. Authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority No. 840940