Some tax saving strategies can be overlooked by professionals who tend to concentrate on their own area of expertise. Meaningful tax planning needs encompass income tax, corporation tax, capital gains tax (CGT) and other forms of personal or corporate taxation in the round. Mitigating tax is rewarding but often involves different professionals including personal accountant, financial adviser and solicitor. Wright Hassall believes that individual clients with wealth to protect may require a bespoke service to deal with complicated estate planning issues.
Tax planning works best when there is consensus between professional advisers. Normally, clients tend to consult their advisers separately and can end up with different and sometimes conflicting pieces of advice. To counter this, we are now offering a service where we organise individual, wealth management conferences for clients. These offer high net worth clients and their families the opportunity to sit round a table with all their principal advisers and discuss wealth management strategies.
The format of the meetings will vary. They can be held at our offices or in the client’s own home or place of work, and other family members may be included. An introductory report is sent to the advisers summarising the client’s current situation. Clients will be asked to bring to meetings additional documents such as their company or personal accounts if they have them. At the meeting, the client and advisers can review objectives, discuss expectations and consider a variety of options and suggestions. After the meeting, the advisers produce a report detailing the most appropriate wealth management strategies for the client. A follow up meeting would then take place to fine tune the recommendations and to discuss how to progress the advice to the next stage.
If you would like further information concerning the Wealth Management Meeting scheme please contact Charles McKenzie for further details.
This article first appeared in NewsBrief Summer 2006
