Reducing your hours before retirement
Cutting to three days a week reduces your advising time. The work of running a regulated firm stays the same.
Cutting to three days a week reduces your advising time. The work of running a regulated firm stays the same.
A common plan is to slow down without stopping: drop to three days, see the clients you like, and hand the rest to somebody else.
This reduces the advising, and the work of running the firm stays the same.
Your governance calendar stays the same however many days you work. So do SM&CR, regulatory reporting, your PI renewal, your Consumer Duty framework, your file review programme and new regulatory publications. A firm with half the revenue has broadly the same fixed regulatory workload as one with all of it.
The advising halves. The running of the business stays the same. Three days a week can become one day of clients and two days of everything else.
A firm that stops taking on new clients ages at the same rate as its clients. Assets are drawn down, the average age of clients rises, and more of the income comes from households in decumulation. After five years, the firm you sell has a materially different shape from the firm you have today, because no new clients came in.
Slowing down for five years and then selling can produce a worse result than stopping now, or than arranging for the firm to keep taking on clients without you doing it.
Keep advising at the level that suits you, and move the regulated running of the firm to a team that does it full time.
Under Securo, compliance, paraplanning, administration and infrastructure move to Equity & General, you carry on advising at your own pace, and the team keeps working through your clients, including the legacy relationships you no longer have time for.
How to record why you did not recommend the obvious alternative, in four lines on the file.
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Preparing for the change in your working life after the sale, as well as for the transaction.
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How the change to inheritance tax on pensions affects your own pension and the timing of your exit.
Read itSteven Bates, Director of Advisory at Equity & General, takes the first call with every adviser. Ring him on 020 8396 0486 or send a short note about your firm.