As a member of the BMA, I occasionally get promotional emails from them and their partners. One such partner is Chase de Vere, an independent financial advisor. They send out regular notices of their free webinars talking about retirement planning, wealth building and investment advice, which can be be quite interesting to watch. However one such email invited me to get a free 'financial health check' - this seemed too good to pass up! I thought I'd go through what happened during this health check, and to remind you that no company gives you something of value that is truly free.
Signing Up
After clicking through the link, putting in your details and deciding on when you want to do it, you get sent a welcome email. The email invites you to sign up to their web portal where they ask you for details of your finances:
- A completed Income and Expenditure document (which they provide)
- Details of your existing plans such as: life, critical illness and income protection plans, savings plans and investments
- Mortgage details
- Your latest payslip (employed) or latest accounts (self-employed)
- Your most recent NHS pension statement or Total Reward Statement, if available
- Your most recent Annual Allowance statement, if applicable/available
In a way, to have all these documents or knowledge, already means you have some financial know-how already. The portal they use is very detailed and user-friendly, and though I didn't use it most of the features, they have ways of tracking your net-worth portfolio on their website which is useful if you don't do it already.
The meeting
You can choose to do it over video or phone; I chose video as I thought it would be easier to see graphs etc. The financial advisor was nice enough, quite articulate but I had the feeling he was almost following a script of sort. I imagine he had a checklist of things he needed to go down and check off, to see what he could sell me. Now I know it was 'free', but I wasn't naive to think that they would give me a real proper financial health check and advice for free.
After finding out I don't have a will and income protection (which I know is important but been too busy to look into it), he asked me questions such as "what will your family do if you die?", "how will your family cope if you couldn't work for 1 year" and "How will you retire comfortably if you couldn't work", questions I'm sure designed to scare you. There would be graphs explaining how if I stopped working, how my lifestyle would suffer and I wouldn't make any savings towards retirement. He went on a risk-reality calculator (found
here) to show my the potential risks I was under, I was 58% likely to not work for at least 2 months before the age of 55 and there was an 8% chance of me dying before then! After I was sufficiently scared, the sales pitch came - income protection insurance. They could find the best deals for us at the next meeting.
Now what would this cost. I was informed they do not charge an upfront fee for this. However, the insurance company will pay Chase de Vere a commision for introducing them to me. So whether they find the cheapest one or the most appropriate one for me or the one that pays them the most commission will be most interesting to see. They asked me if I needed help with my investments. They said they could look after it, and they would charge 0.5-0.75% of the assets under management. So if you happened to have a very large portfolio (and they likely manage quite a few big portfolios), they can pocket quite a bit. I declined.
I have a follow up with them in the next few months, where they will find me some income protection insurance and see what else they can sell to me. If they can find me a good income protection deal, then I think they may deserve their commision.They also said they could sort out my inaccurate NHS pension statements, which has definitely been a headache of mine. I'll keep you informed on how it goes.
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