Category: Advice

You enter the Supermarket.  “Bread, butter, toothpaste, onions. Bread, butter, toothpaste, onions. ”  A nearby customer glances at you quizzically as you mumble your list under your breath.  Twenty minutes later, you leave the store with a cart full of food – but no toothpaste!

Familiar?

You’re not a storage device

One of Lifes’ truisms is that we forget things – whether it’s groceries, someone’s birthday or, horror of horrors, an important meeting – because our brains weren’t designed to store everything perfectly.

To remedy this, maybe we should outsource our memory. And that means writing things down. But it’s more than the trusty shopping list.  That is, all your thoughts and ideas, work-related and home-related, should be committed to the page as they occur.

In a meeting? Get the whiteboard out, scribble on it and take a pic of it before you leave. Profound realization over breakfast? Note down that you need to spend more time with your family.

There’s no ground breaking innovation in jotting things down, but doing so consistently will unload the worries and to-dos from your stressed brain onto a safe place where they won’t be forgotten.

Just be sure to always have a small notepad or your phone at the ready. The latter, which we always have with us, don’t we, has a Notepad App. Specifically for these occurrences. Try it!

But don’t forget to look at it !!!!!!

“Most advisers take the view that the RDR (Retail Distribution Review) which is essence removed commission from investment products, provided the quality of advice but effectively reduced the distribution of it. Most will conduct a face to face fact-finding meeting but finding a way to do it remotely, lowers the cost associated with the advice process.

Less face-to-face doesn’t necessarily impact on the adviser-client relationship, as long as it is face-to-face when it needs to be,” says a prominent member of the IFA community.

Indeed he, – a member of the FCA’s Smaller Business Practitioner Panel since 2014 – sees client home visits being a thing of the past fairly soon.

“Two or three client visits a day is as much as I can do if I’m travelling. But if I’m hosting client meetings from my office I can do six, easily. It’s about the efficiency of labour and the associated impact on costs.

And he adds, Advisers are not as tuned to this as they might be, as they don’t record their time on the whole.

“Recording their time will give them more insight. Combine this with the increased use of digital assistance, and you have reasonable potential to drive costs down without reducing the quality of advice,” he says.