Business Owners

We recently met with the owners of a local family business who had requested that they wanted to protect a bank loan that they had recently taken out.  On discussion we established that the loan was to buy out a family member who wished to retire as they didn’t have the funding. After conducting a full review, the remaining shareholders realised that the business did not have any sort of provisions in place to protect against the loss of a shareholder and the buy back of the shares. In addition we suspected that the original memorandum and articles of association conflicted with their current shareholders agreement. After a referral to a City Law firm and working closely with their company accountant, we were able to put appropriate protection policies in place and legal documents to protect the business going forward. The directors now have the peace of mind knowing that the company shares will pass back to the right people at the right time if something were to happen to a shareholder and they wouldn’t have to take out another bank loan if the worst were to happen. In addition we are currently working on a savings strategy to help build future funds for when shareholders wish to retire in the future.

Redundancy

We were contacted by a 58 year old city professional who was about to take voluntary redundancy from her company and was about to finalise her leaving package. In discussions, we realised that she had spent some time abroad during her tenure with her employer and thus would qualify for foreign service relief. In addition to this, she had three various company pension schemes which had not been fully funded and wanted to know if she should make a pension contribution from her redundancy package. She was also concerned about having enough income to survive on going forward as she did not anticipate generating the same salary levels as she had enjoyed previously.  After some careful planning and a referral to our tax specialist, we were able to save our client a considerable about of tax from her redundancy package. We were able to generate the shortfall in income that she needed from her investments without the need to draw upon her pension funds which she was keen to leave invested for as long as possible.

Financial Planning

We recently were approached by a client who had decided to stop work as a main board director for a FTSE listed company she really wanted to know how long their accumulated investments would last before having to return to work and what impact there would be on her family if she took time out to spend with the children.

We worked closely with her and her husband building a detailed cash flow plan based around their income, expenditure, assets and liabilities. We created multiple scenarios around whether they should buy a more expensive country home, gifting money into trusts to reduce the IHT, what happens if either of them die and what happened if she never came back to work and how early could they afford to retire.

It was a very rewarding experience for them and as they left, despite being wealthy, commented on how much better organised they were to plan their future. This really is financial planning in action.