Help finding a financial advisor

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Hello - I'd like to talk through our pensions and savings for our children with a financial advisor. Basically, I need someone to just look at what we've got and provide advice on whether we are on track for a reasonable pension etc. The problem I have is that we dont have a huge amont of savings and most of our pensions are tied up in a work scheme, so there's not a huge pot of money for a financial advisor to play around with. I want someone who can get their head around what savings we have and our pension scheme rules and explain what we will get and when. But they won't be earning a commission. I'm happy to pay, but most financial advisor profiles I've looked at say things like 'minimum pot of £100k'. How can I find someone who will do do a bit of a financial review?? Thanks in advance for any advice.

Why waste your money paying an IFA to tell you about the details of your workplace scheme, when all they can do is ask you to get those to show them?
Unless you’re in a scheme with lots of publicly available information (such as NHS) in which case there is lots of good information online.
You’d be better off investing your time in understanding your pensions yourself than investing your money getting someone else too!
MoneySavingExpert has an excellent pensions forum, and there are plenty of people on here who can help explain it too. But for more technical detail I’d advise MSE.

Keep in mind too, that no IFA can tell you exactly what you’ll get, and when. Because those things are variable!
They can tell you the earliest age you can access (based on current legislation and scheme rules) but that’s easy for you to find out yourself. You’ll get so much more for your money in a review if you’ve sorted the basics for yourself.

BoringMoney has a search facility. You will need to spend time contacting people.

Maybe a financial coach would be useful instead... they cannot give suggestions for products to use (not even saying to use ISA) but they can look at your overall position.

You could read some books, listen to podcasts, maybe even do an online course, so you learn yourself enough about what you could do.

An IFA can help you do a cashflow forecast but you can that yourself.

Guiide app may be enough to give you an idea. VoyantGo could give you more, but you will need to learn how to use it.
Have a look at this video, is that the sort of thing you want to be able to do?

www.moneyadviceservice.org.uk/en.html

www.moneyhelper.org.uk/en/pensions-and-retirement

www.moneysavingexpert.com/savings/child-savings-tax-free/ - assuming you do mean savings, not investments.

If you have less than £100k to invest, the fees you'll pay are unlikely to be covered by the amount you might gain. If you're not looking to invest at all - only cash savings - then they won't do anything for you...

You should get at least an annual statement for your work scheme pension, showing "if you retire at age x then you can expect y amount". You really shouldn't need to pay someone else to explain the "rules" to you - the pension provider should give you that info for free. The Money Helper site linked above will tell you how pensions work, what the state pension will give you, what to expect at retirement, how much you should be aiming for etc.

Thanks everyone. I do know the rules of my work pension. The problem is they changed the scheme rules so I have part of my pension I can get at 60 and the other at state retirement age. So one of my questions is whether, if I retire before state retirement age, I have to take the second part of my pension early. Another question is about fees - I have a small stakeholder pension I'm currently contributing about £200pcm to. I want to know if the fees are reasonable compared to the return on the product. And for my kids i invest about £100pcm in stocks and shares, but again would like someone to test whether the fees are reasonable. Questions like that. I know I could research and find all this info, but it would be far simpler and faster if I could just sit down with someone for an hour and talk through.

But that's the thing, isn't it... it would be easier & quicker, however would be a very expensive way to do it.

Your specific question about your work pension - the provider will be able to answer that, and adviser might not. You'd need to give the adviser all the paperwork for them to read, to tell you; which is a long & roundabout way that will cost you money to get information you could find out yourself for nothing.

Regarding fees, stakeholder pension fees are capped so there is unlikely to be a massive variation in fees between different providers. You'd need to look around at returns for comparable products to see if you're happy with the overall return; but you could look at a handful in a half an hour and see whether yours is in the same ballpark as others. If not then it's a bit longer checking out alternatives, but at that point it might be something where an adviser is value for money because you know that you can get a better return.
www.moneyhelper.org.uk/en/pensions-and-retirement/pensions-basics/stakeholder-pensions
www.koody.co/pensions/stakeholder-pension

For your children's investments, if it's in a fund then the fee should depend on the fund type - the platform that you use will allow you to compare it to other similar funds (or look at other types of fund). Again, if it's a "is this ok" then it'll take you half an hour or so to check it out; it's only if you check it out & think ha no it's not ok, that you'd want to spend longer looking at a few alternatives.

The thing about paying an adviser for "an hour" is that for one hour with you, they'll have spent several hours (or more) going through your paperwork & researching - you would be paying hundreds of pounds for "peace of mind". If you're investing tens of thousands then that's one thing, but you're investing less than £4k a year - for an adviser to be value for money, they'd need to increase your returns by 10-15% just to break even. So you're spending money but not getting more for your investments - why bother?

Hi OP, I guess your in a public service pension such as NHS or teachers pension? Are you a member of a union? If so, you can usually have a complimentary session with a financial adviser.
Generally, you can take your scheme pension that is in the earlier scheme and defer taking the newer scheme until you reach that scheme’s pension age.
As most scheme reduce the pension actuarially if you take it early, theoretically you will still end up with the same amount of money as a lower amount is paid for several more years.
Scheme rules vary, i.e. if you take any pension benefits from the NHS 1995 section, you can no longer have active NHS pension membership.

Hi. Try unbiased.co.uk (or.com) for IFAs in your area.

Shop around because their charges vary massively.

“so I have part of my pension I can get at 60 and the other at state retirement age. So one of my questions is whether, if I retire before state retirement age, I have to take the second part of my pension early.”

If your pension is public sector, then an IFA could tell you - but only after you give them so much info that you’ve almost found it out yourself.

If it’s private sector occupational pension, an IFA can’t tell you. They probably can’t even tell you if you give them a scheme booklet because detail like this often isn’t covered. So you’d be paying the IFA to tell you to contact your company pension department.

You're better off answering this one for yourself, for free.

I know you asked about finding an IFA and so I’m not answering your question 😉
But it doesn’t make sense to ask an IFA something they’d have to go through you to answer!

This is a good site to explain the different charges so that you know what you’re looking at to compare. You have to pay something so I don’t think the comparison is, “how does fee compare to my return” but “how does this fee compare to other providers”. An IFA will certainly be able to say, “that’s about average” or “I can find you cheaper” - but you can do that on the internet yourself.
www.moneyhelper.org.uk/en/pensions-and-retirement/pensions-basics/pension-scheme-charges

I'm not an IFA. But I know there are different ways to handle the issue of the 60/state pension age split in pension schemes.

Essentially you take the 60 bit at 60. Although be careful make sure you can keep contributing to the other scheme if you need to. But this isn't your full pension so you have a gap.
To fill this income gap you could:

• take the bit that kicks in at state pension age early, at a reduced rate. With this approach you may still have a gap because the state pension itself won't kick in until state pension age, and that is a hefty chunk
• plug the gap with your stakeholder pension
• plug the gap with part time work, either in the same profession/workplace or somewhere entirely different e.g. a garden centre or a supermarket. Look into the details of this, as some schemes/workplaces have caps on how much work you can do once you are drawing aome scheme benefits
• a combination of the above

Remember the McCloud remedy. If you are in a public sector pension and were forced into a new scheme in an age discriminatory way you will have more options, and might have final salary membership until 2022, not 2015.

But overall, I'm with everyone above. A good grasp of your finances is not something to outsource. It is too important. Invest your time in yourself and learn your way around this. It is empowering and hugely beneficial.