Remote Pension IFA?

tgon

Is it possible or practicable to engage with an advisor without ever meeting them? And by selecting their services based on say, their web site, a perfunctory phone call or even their manner and perceived professionalism on these forums? Notwithstanding that a local IFA may provide a poor service, what would the pitfalls be of a remote IFA, especially in complex pension or investment products. Thanks.

dunstonh

Remote IFA works fine. It is different to face to face as typically its emails going back and forth. However, that provides a good audit trail for both sides and allows you to think about things before writing a message whereas face to face you have think on your feet.

At the end of the day, advice is based on facts. Facts dont change whether you speak to someone or email them.

jamesd

It really will depend on the communication skills of the people involved. An IFA who expresses themselves well here is likely to also do so well in a remote IFA relationship because they will have shown that they at least have the expressive ability. One who's mostly doing face to face business may have more trouble with a remote relationship.

Unless you've conversed extensively online it's a good thing to have at least one phone conversation about anything moderately complicated. That's because it's a better way of expressing shades of feeling and view than writing typically is and allows a useful more interactive question and answer session. Just don't expect an IFA to do lots of calculations or analysis during a call, that's unrealistic.

I've been discussing things online very extensively for close to twenty years and do it routinely at work with customers so by now I'm pretty fluent in expressing meaning in complicated technical areas. Not IFA work but many of the principles are the same, including the fact finding aspects.

While it's possible that say dunstonh's personality may not mesh well with someone on the phone or in person, what I've seen over the years here is that dunstonh has a good and flexible range of options that are suggested as appropriate for the circumstances of the person asking the question. That bodes well for anyone who was to use dunstonh in an advice relationship. That's the sort of flexibility and variation that you should be looking for in online postings.

Because expressions don't translate well into text, take particular care in expressing the degree of strength of feeling you have in different areas with careful selection of words of graduated strength or use percentages or one to ten scales if you're more comfortable with that. Many decisions are not clear yes/no types but are instead based on a range of tolerance for things like risk or the relative desirability of certain features. Good communication about this can help the IFA to know which products might best suit your needs.

Whoever you deal with the main pitfalls come with not asking enough questions or getting sufficient answers before engaging in a transaction. While I dislike asking lots of questions and maybe not transacting on an anticipated timescale, that beats a transaction that a customer ends up regretting, for all parties involved. If the product is simple and requires minimal ongoing work those questions might be quite simple, if it's one you're going to interact with extensively for years you should be doing all you can to fully understand how it works before doing anything but asking and learning.

It's also helpful to have some idea of when the busy and quiet times for IFAs are. We're starting to get into what may be the busiest time of the year, just before the new tax year, so if you have lots of questions you can improve the performance of an IFA by doing it at at time when they are less busy. Not a reason not to do things now if that's necessary, just how normal time management and pressures work.

A good question to ask towards the end of a discussion is something like "is there anything else that I haven't asked about yet that you think I might like or need to know?" That's an open-ended opportunity for the IFA to fill in any gaps between the questions that you've asked. "thanks, if you do think of anything else that I might want to know before deciding please don't hesitate to let me know later" can also be a useful near-ending sentence to encourage the IFA to fully use their knowledge to help you.

Part of this can also vary depending on the nature of the service being purchased. If you're making an execution-only purchase the IFA should be willing to describe all features of the products they sell but if you start to ask them to make recommendations you're going beyond execution only and on to advice. Take care with such service creep to ensure that you and the IFA keep the relationship one of the type that you originally intended. The IFA needs to watch this as well and let you know, since they are the party primarily responsible for knowing where the thresholds for them are. Whether you choose to change the relationship type or say "thanks, sorry about that, please don't hesitate to let me know if I drift too far that way again, how about feature x...." depends on your preference. Maybe you'll realise that you have so much you don't know that you end up preferring advice.

tgon

Thank you for such a comprehensive reply, it helped a great deal. After a couple of years following some regular contributors in the forums, I start to see personality behind the facts. Yes, dunstonh is confident, logical and pragmatic (and probably hates kittens) whereas others often offer rudimentary advice with extra rude!

At 56 my pension schemes worry me - in the way that navigating a map entirely written in Greek would. Whilst I know I'm driving somewhere, I've no idea where the road is taking me! In a few weeks I'll have an annual statement from my largest scheme and will seek appropriate advice without constricting my thoughts to the local IFA market. Thanks again.

damperman

Just to add that i recently started drawing my pensions at 60, and after a lot of searching i came up with an IFA 200 miles away.
I never met him, only talked on the phone.
The outcome, i came out with a very good deal and more than happy with the result.