How we work, and how we are paid

We are paid by the families we advise, and by no one else. That is what fee-only means, and it is the whole of our business model.

A fee shown only as a percentage is easy to read past. So we state it twice: as a percentage of what we look after, and as an amount in pounds for the year. You can set that figure beside your own statement and see that the two agree.

A pension fund has to account for every cost to its trustees in writing. We think a family deserves the same, and we would rather you asked about the fee in the first conversation than discovered it in the fifth year.

See what a fee does over time

We take no payment from anyone whose products we might recommend. Nothing we suggest earns us more than anything else we could have suggested.

That leaves us free to give the advice that is sometimes least rewarding for an adviser: to change nothing, to hold cash for a while, or to choose the plainer and cheaper option over the elaborate one.

We are independent. We are not tied to a fund range or a provider, so the question we ask of every recommendation is a simple one: is this right for this family, at this cost?

Each family works with one adviser, by name. That person knows the investments, the retirement plan, the trusts and the people involved, and how they fit together.

You do not repeat your story to a new face each year, and you do not pass through a call centre to reach the person who knows it. When something changes in your family, one call is enough.

We are six people in all. In a firm that size, your adviser is never far from the colleagues who manage the money, and decisions about your family are made by people who have met you.