Investments & wealth management

Investments come in many shapes and sizes, some designed for income and some growth, some will be of a lower risk nature and some higher. Different types of investment products can have very different tax treatments with some being exempt from income or capital gains tax and some exempt from inheritance tax. Some investments such as pensions and Venture Capital Trusts (VCT) come with income tax relief whilst others such as Enterprise Investment Schemes (EIS), come with income tax relief, capital gains tax relief and deferral and are also free from inheritance tax.

The range of investment funds available is mind numbing and includes both stars and the real down and outs. The important thing is to keep your portfolio reviewed and balanced, making sure that no one holding or sector dominates and thus creates additional risk, whilst weeding out the under performing assets to keep the performance up.

In reviewing your portfolio it is important make sure that any investments you have are:

  • Relevant to your needs
  • Held in a tax efficient way
  • Appropriate to your ethical view
  • Performing against their peers
  • In balance with your overall portfolio

Often people build up investments over their working lives but then need to realize them to fund retirement or may just want to make sense of a muddle.

As fee based advisers we do not need to recommend new products to earn a living thus we will only recommend a change were it serves some good purpose for you.

Making life simpler
Often clients, having built up a complicated array of investments, want to simplify things but again this doesn’t have to mean selling things. For instance, it is often possible to re-register investment funds via new style fund supermarkets for little or no cost, reducing statements down to just one rather than 100s. Another added advantage of fund supermarkets is that you can usually switch between funds at large discounts to normal terms, and carry out transactions a lot faster.

Paying off the mortgage or selling an endowment policy
Endowment policies were the main way that many people expected to repay their mortgages and were also used as stand alone savings vehicles, but they have fallen out of favour now and many are no longer projected to pay off the debts they were intended to.

Options to fill the gap of under-performing savings may be:

  • Switching to a repayment mortgage or part repayment mortgage
  • Topping up the gap with an additional savings vehicle - ISAs are often used for this purpose

You may also consider surrendering or selling the endowment and using the capital value to clear debt early and moving to a repayment mortgage or replacing with another savings vehicle and life protection policy.

If you are considering surrendering an unwanted endowment policy then you may be able to get more for it by selling it. There now exists an established market in traded endowments and you could get a substantial increase on the surrender value.

If you are considering selling your endowment then we can obtain a no obligation quote for the sale of your policy - also see the protection page for a quote for replacement life cover.

If you would like help, please contact us.