Sarah has run her own IFA practice in Bristol for eleven years. Around eighty client families, mostly people approaching or in retirement, the sort of book built slowly on referrals.
Last year she changed one thing about her annual reviews. She added twenty minutes at the end that had nothing to do with money.
Why she changed it
“A client died. Not unexpectedly, he’d been ill. And his wife rang me about six weeks later, and she was in a complete state, not about grief, about admin. She didn’t know which pensions there were. She’d found paperwork for a policy she’d never heard of. And I sat there realising I knew more about their financial life than she did, and I’d never once asked whether that was a problem.”
“That was the whole thing. I’d had the information for eleven years and never thought to check whether anyone else did.”
What the twenty minutes covers
Six questions, asked the same way every time. Is the will current. Is there a registered lasting power of attorney. Are the pension nominations right. Does the protection still match the liability. Could the household function if you were in hospital for a month. Do the children know any of this.
“The first few felt clunky. I was worried it sounded like I thought they were about to die. What I found instead was that people were relieved. Several said some version of, I’ve been meaning to sort that out for years.”
What came out of it
Across roughly eighty reviews in the first year, the tally was substantial.
Fourteen clients had no will, or one so out of date it named a deceased executor. Nine had signed a lasting power of attorney but never registered it, which meant it would not have worked. More than twenty had pension nominations naming someone wrong, in three cases a former spouse.
“The nominations one shocked me. These are people I see every year. It had simply never come up, because it’s not on any of the standard forms and it lives with the scheme rather than with me.”
The one that mattered
One conversation stands out. A client in his late sixties, whose wife had started to seem different in ways he was reluctant to name.
“He didn’t mention it directly. But when I asked about the power of attorney he went quiet and then said, we should probably do that soon, shouldn’t we. And I said yes, I think you probably should.”
They did it that month. Her dementia diagnosis came the following spring.
“If we’d left it another eighteen months she may not have had the capacity to grant it, and he’d have been looking at the Court of Protection, which takes months and costs thousands and takes the decision out of your hands entirely. That one question, asked at the right moment, saved that family an enormous amount of difficulty.”
What it did for the business
Sarah is straightforward about the commercial side.
“Referrals went up, and they went up from the families rather than the clients. I’ve met adult children I’d never met in a decade. Three of them are now clients themselves.”
“And when a client did die this year, the widow rang me on the second day, and I could tell her exactly where everything was. That’s a completely different phone call from the one I had two years ago.”
What she would tell another adviser
“Don’t build a service around it. Just add the questions. It’s twenty minutes, it costs you nothing and it goes exactly where your clients are already worried.”
“And be ready for the silence after you ask whether their family could find things. That pause is the whole point. Don’t rescue it.”
Where FamilySafe fits
Sarah’s clients now keep their own picture in FamilySafe and share the relevant view with her. “It means the review is a check rather than an interrogation. I can see what’s changed, what’s missing and what’s gone stale, and we spend the twenty minutes on what actually needs doing.”
Names and identifying details have been changed.
