We are delighted and very humbled to have been placed once again in the Citywire Top 100 Financial Advisers list for 2024.
The well-respected online news, advice and analysis platform for those in the asset management and wealth industry publishes its Top 100 list annually and says it ‘celebrates the best of the professional financial planning community’.
We would like to thank everyone at Citywire for the judgment and especially our loyal clients for their support in helping us achieve and retain this position.
Plus a special thank you to all the directors and our staff team for enabling us to secure our place again and under some very challenging conditions these last few years thanks to events in the wider world.
Whilst none of us are perfect and there is always more that can be done, it is great that independent assessors recognise the high quality, care and outcomes we have always endeavoured to demonstrate to all our clients, with their best interests at the forefront of all we do.
At the end of the day, these principles of integrity are in our best interests too.
‘Buyer’s remorse’ as clients try to return tax-free cash
You may recall we advised strongly that people should not rush to take their tax-free lump sum cash from their pensions before the recent Budget?
Citywire has reported that the platform Nucleus has seen a ‘spike in clients returning cash’ after they had accessed their pension pots because they were worried the cap on the 25% tax-free lump sum would be lowered from £268,275 to £100,000.
Some, including Nucleus, had offered a 30-day cooling-off period, which advisers’ clients are now using to cancel their tax-free cash withdrawals after Chancellor Rachel Reeves left the lump sum rules alone.
Nucleus head of technical services Andrew Tully told a recent conference people had been cancelling transactions during the cooling-off period.
He said: “There was a spike in activity ahead of the Budget for all benefits and then another spike in taking money back, I’m sure there are some resource issues going on across the industry.”
We had plenty of enquiries from anxious clients too and you will recall we certainly advised against making any knee-jerk decisions based on emotion or unknown variables until the facts were known.
Indeed it was our opinion and that of most of the industry that the Chancellor would not touch the lump sum threshold and so it proved.
We agree with Mr Tully’s further comments that it only made sense for clients to withdraw that tax-free cash if they had planned to do that soon in any case as part of their retirement plans.
If it was on the agenda, there would be little harm in bringing the decision forward slightly as a ‘just in case’ measure, but that would have been something to discuss properly with your adviser first.
Making major and potentially life-changing decisions based on little more than rumour and media speculation is highly unlikely to end well and we would want all of our clients to have all the facts and take guidance before jumping into anything.
As we’ve said on many occasions, you don’t employ a plumber and then fix your boiler yourself with little or no knowledge, so please do discuss things properly with your adviser and let them help you.
