Working With a Fee-Only Financial Advisor

The most important benefit you get when you deal with PrudentFP is that, we are fee-only financial advisors. As mentioned earlier, we are SEBI Registered Investment Advisers ( RIAs ) and comply to much higher standards required of RIAs. We represent our clients only – You! This is diametrically opposite to distributors/ agents who represent their principals.

Agents who sell products represent their principals & get paid by them. Their loyalties lie with their principals and do their bidding in terms of selling whichever product they want to promote, at that point. Clients are a means to achieve their targets. They can never be true Fiduciaries, who put their client’s interest ahead of their own. The mode of compensation ensures that they can never offer unbiased, conflict-free advice; they can never be true advisors, even if they have the knowledge.

All of us want our advisors to act in our best interest, have sufficient knowledge to advise us, are interested in us rather than in selling some product and scooting. Then you need to employ high-quality advisors who don’t sell products and are interested in offering aligned advice to you. For that to happen, they need to be only & truly be interested in your welfare.

To fully align the interests of clients & advisors, the advisors should be only answerable to clients and should receive their compensation only from their clients. Only in such a case, you can be sure that their advisors work only in the client’s best interests.

This is why the compensation mechanism is very important. Even if commission-based & fee-based compensation are the same in money terms, the outcome will be widely different. Fee-only compensation method is hence the best from the client’s viewpoint.

Understanding The Client

At PrudentFP, firstly we understand what is that you want in life. We help you think & articulate as to what is that you want in life – what are your goals & objectives. Only then, we would be able to offer a solution that meets your requirements. Hence, we gather comprehensive information on our client regarding their personal life situation, their expectations, and goals as well as their financial position. Based on this, we figure out, what needs to be done for them.

We first establish the feasibility of achieving all goals in the timeframes envisaged and can go ahead only if it can be established.

Analysis, Strategies & Way Forward

We analyse the information and come up with alternative scenarios, consider strategies that would best work in that situation, completely look at all financial decisions one has taken and it’s fitment & relevance to where one wants to go. The feasibility of the scenarios that you want is tested after which we are good to go ahead with it. Once these are discussed with you, one of the scenarios is chosen as the path to proceed forward.

Creating The Blueprint

Once this becomes clear, to make things work for you, we create a comprehensive blueprint that will help in realising your goals. This would involve calculations on insurance requirements, cash flows, providing for goals, provisioning for liquidity & contingency etc. After a complete 360 degrees analysis, we would come up with our recommendation.

Clear Actionable Recommendations

At the end of the planning process, we come up with clear, detailed and actionable recommendations. We would give recommendations on what needs to be done with existing investments/ insurances and loans. We would also give recommendations on surpluses available now, coming in later as well as monthly surpluses that one may have. Any provisions needed for upcoming goals or big expenses are also provided for.

We offer peace of mind, which our clients so richly deserve. You may leave your worries with us. And take instead, clarity about your future & peace of mind!