Financial Adviser

What Is A Financial Adviser and Why Could I Need One?

As your business becomes more successful, it’s important to take stock and look at how to protect what you’ve built, extract cash tax efficiently as you go, and ultimately, plan for future exit and a happy retirement and that’s where a Financial Adviser can help.

A Financial Adviser will help you plan your finances and this starts with a holistic review of your situation – as a business owner, an individual, and as part of a family unit. It then develops into financial and lifestyle goals and creates a plan to achieve them. Regular reviews along the way ensure you stay on track and the plan evolves with your changing circumstances and helps you create financial independence from your business.

How Could Mandy Work With My Business?

Mandy can support you with a number of services including:

Business Protection

Consider how the business would cope in the event of a key shareholder’s death. How could the business buy out their shares? How do you ensure the bereaved family receive the share value but the remaining shareholders retain the shares?

The death or serious illness of a key director or employee can have far-reaching consequences for a business. It could lead to:

• A loss of profits
• The recall of loans
• Reduced capacity
• Loss of key clients/contacts
• Reduced practical know-how

Consider Key Person & Shareholder Protection

Employee Benefits

Having an effective benefits and remuneration strategy that is clearly communicated and appreciated by your employees can really help you to retain and recruit high calibre employees.

The cost of protecting your people and their families against the financial consequences of serious illness and death is probably lower than you would expect.

Extracting Cash Tax Efficiently

This process involves taking a sensible policy toward extracting profits from your business and investing them in a tax-efficient investment environment.

One part of this strategy could be the use of pension plans. This will help for many reasons:

• • You receive full corporation tax relief and suffer no personal tax on the contributions the company makes.
  • The funds grow free of all major UK taxes.
  • You no longer need to buy an annuity at retirement.
  • You are able to take up to a quarter of the accumulated funds as a tax free lump sum for any purpose from age 55, your funds are completely ring fenced outside your business and should normally have complete protection from creditors

Planning for Exit*

Many business owners regard their business as their primary source of retirement planning. ‘My business is my pension’ is an expression often used. In other words, they expect to realise sufficient capital from the sale of their business to secure a comfortable retirement for themselves and their immediate family. For some this will become a reality, although for many it will remain an unrealised dream.

We find that many business owners who take the time to consider their future conclude that creating financial independence from their business, using tax efficient savings products, is a strategy well worth investigating.

At the point of exit, taking proper financial advice is key to protecting your long-term financial future, and preserving tax benefits and reliefs wherever possible as your wealth passes down the generations.

The value of an investment with St. James’s Place will be directly linked to the performance of the funds you select and the value can therefore go down as well as up. You may get back less than you invested.

The levels and bases of taxation, and reliefs from taxation, can change at any time. The value of any tax relief is dependent on individual circumstances,

* Exit strategies may involve the referral to a service that is separate and distinct to those offered by St. James’s Place.