Women in Financial Services
E2Wealthier starts in style
Katie.Dix / 24 Jul 2020
E2Wealthier is brought to you by members, Kristel del Rosario along with Jade Fallen, Meenal Sambre and Maria Zdravkova.
E2Wealthier starts in style
We launched our series of E2Wealthier sessions with a great presentation from Raymond James, the City wealth management firm. Many thanks to E2W member Cynthia Poole, who works at Raymond James and arranged the event for us, as well as the presenter James Johnson.
James is a highly experienced financial planner at Raymond James and he took us through the basics of investing for the future – beginning with some deeply worrying statistics. It turns out that the average UK household has less than £10,000 in savings and more than 20% of the over 55s have less than £1,000 in savings.
Hopefully, your personal situation is much better than that, but for most of us, it still makes sense to dig a well before we’re thirsty – and that means making a financial plan. Kristel pointed out at the start of the presentation, we can spend hours researching a holiday to make sure we get it right, but many of us spend far less time on something far more important – our life savings. It could be time to take action. Maria, also made an interesting and insightful comment that 'a man is not a plan!'
James highlighted the key questions to answer before you can start planning – what you want to achieve, when you want it and how much it is likely to cost. Plus, if you have several goals, can you afford them all and, if not, which one is most important or what changes can you make to achieve everything.
Armed with this information, it’s then time to look at where you can save. James introduced long-term options (such as pensions, property and ISAs) and shorter-term options (such as fixed-term deposits and ISAs again).
Perhaps the highlight of the presentation was the way that James brought everything to life with a case study about Sarah, a high earner with two clear goals – moving to a bigger house in eight years and retiring in 22.
James showed us the savings plan he built for her and the way she could potentially take a tax-free income of £40,000 a year at retirement – though he was also keen to stress that this example, and indeed the whole presentation, was purely information not advice for anyone’s specific situation.
We closed with some fascinating questions from our audience covering areas as varied as how to chose an IFA, whether second properties should be held in a limited company and what protection is available for savers and investors.
For a session that lasted less than an hour, we covered a lot of ground. If you’d like to watch it yourself, please see the full video below.
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