The best piece of advice I gave this year...

From winning £3,500 for an elderly client in time for Christmas to a spot of career advice, 2011 has again been a year of proud moments for IFAs...

Giving financial advice is never run-of-the-mill: it is always as varied as your client base. Professional Adviser spoke to a number of advisers about some of their memorable interactions with clients in 2011.

Breaking misconceptions

Jason Witcombe, director of Evolve Financial Planning, met a new client who earned £250,000 but had failed to make any pension savings. She feared, Witcombe said, “locking her money away” and believed she had to buy an annuity and would lose all her money if she died.

Witcombe explained: “She is 40 so it is only locked away until 55 and she has plenty of liquid assets which meant she could afford to tie some of this up. I also explained alternatives to annuity purchase. With carry-forward allowances, this client could pay in around £100,000 for the current tax year with tax relief at 50%. When I put it to her that she could have £50,000 in her pocket or £100,000 in a pension which would probably only be taxed at the basic rate when she retired, she suddenly became a bit more keen.”

Moving fast

Malcolm Steel, an adviser with Mearns & Co, said he helped a client invest part of his pension fund in an annuity prior to the European Court of Justice ruling on gender pricing. “He was concerned about the potential impact and we worked to a very tight timescale to do this for him,” Steel said.

Meanwhile, James Marchant, an adviser at Sovereign IFA, said he helped a number of clients make the most of National Savings & Investments (NS&I). “We are proud that we managed to get a number of clients into NS&I certificates before they closed. We were very proactive on that because our clients wanted to protect their capital and were nervous about putting any more money into the markets.”

Seeing the big picture

Ian Wishart, director at Wishart Wealth, was pro-active with a business-owner client:w “The client had purchased his business premises outright, but, when he was due to retire, he would not have received entrepreneurial relief on that property. We put the building into a SIPP as a pension contribution, avoided capital gains tax because of depressed prices, got him a corporation tax refund and boosted his pension. It was rewarding because the client’s previous accountant and financial planner had not seen the problem and realised the efficiency he could achieve.”