Already Enjoying Retirement

The Client

Peter was in his early 70s and had around £1.2m of assets invested in a variety of different institutions and tax 'wrappers', including Unit Trusts, Individual Shares, Investment Bonds and ISAs.
As well as being difficult to keep a track on, Peter felt his investments were not delivering the return of the markets and had become increasingly frustrated at their continual underperformance.
Indeed, until recently he had been paying a Stockbroker to actively manage his individual share portfolio and had been promised the market outperformance associated with this sort of 'expertise'. Unfortunately, the Stockbroker presided over a fall in value of his share portfolio of £150,000, which, even in spite of some tough market conditions, was far greater than Peter expected.
Peter also felt that the volatility his investments had been experiencing was too great now that he was a little older and wanted to explore opportunities for reducing risk in his portfolio as a whole.

To establish Peter's true current feelings on risk.
To analyse all of his existing investments, focusing on their ability to help Peter meet his objectives and their cost.
To help Peter understand the reasons for the poor and volatile performance of his investments.
Having determined that his existing investments were of too high a risk profile and in many cases, outrageously expensive, we needed to construct a brand new portfolio which was in-keeping with Peter's risk profile and of considerably lower cost.

We spent time explaining and discussing some of the fundamental principles of investing and the likely reasons why Peter's existing investments had delivered inconsistent and disappointing results.
After Peter had completed a psychometric risk-profiling questionnaire, all but a small amount of his individual share portfolio, which was relatively high risk, was sold.
The proceeds, along with monies from his other existing investments were reinvested into a new, lower risk, lower cost investment strategy, which utilised institutionally priced asset class funds.
Peter and Chamberlyns agreed that whilst the main focus should be on long-term 'investment', Peter could use his remaining small individual share portfolio to pursue his hobbie of 'speculating', thereby maintaining both discipline and enjoyment.
We utilised a third party specialist investment administration platform in order to reduce the number of Peter's separate holdings from 11 to 3. We also transferred his small individual share portfolio to the platform, further consolidating his affairs and reducing the amount of paperwork he received.

Peter now receives the return he expects to receive, based on a greater understanding of his investments. More importantly, he now receives the return he is owed by the markets.
He has reduced his exposure to risk considerably, now taking no more than he is comfortable with.
Peter is saving around £25,000 per annum in lower charges and reduced management costs - and he no longer needs to try to make up this amount by chasing the higher returns associated with higher risk investments.
His affairs are much simpler to understand and manage.
He now feels confident in his investment advisers because he can see that Chamberlyns is a professional practice that has his best interests at heart - and will tell him the truth about his investments, not make promises which cannot be guaranteed.