Essential Questions to Ask a Financial Planner – Part 2

Proposito June 2021

If you’re looking to work with a financial planner, it’s important to get it right. After all, you’ll be building a relationship based around your financial goals and retirement plans, so having a list of ‘interview’ questions will help the selection process.

Last month we looked at one important question to ask: are you independent or restricted? Here we look at another: what is your investment philosophy?

There are many different approaches when it comes to investing, some benefiting the fund manager more than the individual investor. Terms you may come across include active management, or discretionary fund management. We go into detail about these on our website.

At Proposito, we favour index tracking (also known as passive investing). Here, the fund manager owns all the holdings of the index they are tracking. This means fees are lower, as the manager doesn’t need to work out what to buy and when to buy it. Another advantage is investors achieve the returns of the market average (i.e. index) minus fees.

We use low cost, globally diversified index tracking funds, with tilts to factors we believe will deliver additional returns over the long run. Our portfolios include a wide range of investments, catering for a broad spectrum of investment risks. We can also provide a portfolio based on environmental, social and governance funds (ESG). 

Another important question to ask: is their firm regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority? Only firms authorised by the FCA are monitored to ensure they meet the required standards.

In total we came up with ten essential ‘interview’ questions to ask of a financial planner. You can find them all (plus answers to look out for) on our website: https://proposito.co.uk/. To talk to us about investments, pensions or retirement planning, email hello@proposito.co.uk or call our Cirencester office on 01285 708444.

Read Part 1 here.