Meet Simon and Karen

Being 58, although we been thinking about retirement, we hadn’t really done too much about it, my wife is just a little older than me and we’d been putting into our pensions but it wasn’t until that horrible experience when people close to us, around our age died. I know it’s a dreadful thing but it kicked us into thinking “life is no dress rehearsal” and we thought well even if we haven’t got much to live on let’s see what we can do and spend more time travelling (I think the pandemic brought the wish to travel to the forefront of our minds also).

I started with a few ideas, one you need financial advice, even if you are up to speed with finances, interest rates and stock markets unless you are full time I doubt you’ll know all the in’s and out’s of the pension world; plus as we learnt later there are some funds that only advisers can access.

Secondly I’d do my own research and felt contacting a national adviser (or indeed multinational) a regional adviser and a local one and ask them all the same seemed a sensible place to start. It soon transpired that the larger providers only wanted your contact details, how much you’d got saved and wanted to immediately “sell” to you – having spent 20 years in the commercial world that just wasn’t going to work for me. The local adviser although very friendly and personable just wasn’t up to speed, I don’t know much but after a couple of calls I genuinely felt I knew more than them – so again ruled them out as I needed help. This left the regional advisers so a fairly lengthy web search and I arrived at three. Out of these one started to stand out, they had won many regional pension investment awards and were keen to demonstrate all the memberships and guarantees available around their advice. However the other two seems pretty good to, then the decider happened the two other contenders “fell into the multi-national trap”. After a couple of calls they wanted to take our money and tell us what great returns they could get for us; We didn’t want that we wanted advice.

So it left Frazer James, their website gave so much free information and a simple but thought provoking spreadsheet to fill in about what we spend and where, this was the approach we wanted. We put together a “now” and a “we would like to have” scenarios. The two James’s from Frazer James took time to discuss these with us ensure that they were level headed, not missed out anything and really got into our wishes for the future. We did go into this with our eyes wide open so there were no Ferraris or yearlong world cruises included!

Then and only then did they get into our pension accounts, their idea of a draft, limited input proposal matches a full blown complete “this is what you’re getting” from other companies. Were we happy – very happy, they said straight away that from the information we could, if we wished, retire straight away and a fairly detailed plan of how that was going to be achieved. In honesty they didn’t have to ask for our business – they already had it, this was no selling an impossible dream this was matching our aspirations to our financial ability and showing us how it could work.

Needless to say we signed up with Frazer James their detailed advise and recommendations followed, it was easy to follow, very well explained and left us feeling so confident in our advisers – I have never before in my life let anyone so far into my personal situation and finances as with these two gentlemen but they made it easy and made us feel confident and secure.

I haven’t been asked to write this and I don’t do reviews on websites etc. but this is such an important part of life that really doesn’t get the attention it deserves and with so many scams, poor advice and some horror stories I feel compelled to recommend Frazer James wholeheartedly.