Writing Your Life Story – Carbon’s four step process: Part three - Realise

Carbon like to do things differently, our principle is not to endlessly grow your wealth, but instead to use your money to help you live a happy and fulfilling life, spending it on the things that really matter to you.

We do this by first understanding the lifestyle that you want to live; help quantify the cost of this lifestyle; set and maintain the path to achieving this; finally, and most importantly, make sure you spend and enjoy your wealth. To help our clients on this journey we use our four-step process.

Carbon’s four-step process:

Chapter One Visualise - help you to visualise a deeply personal life narrative that excites and inspires you, your life story.

Chapter Two Build - build a plan to show you how to achieve the financial future that you are dreaming of.

Chapter Three Realise - Activate all elements of your plan and give you the freedom to live your life story.

Chapter Four Reflect - Your story will evolve over time, as a partner for life, we regularly review your plan to ensure you remain on track.

This week we will focus on Chapter three: Realise

Realise helps you to start writing your life story by implementing all aspects of your plan. This brings your plan to life and is the part of the process where we retain, change, or move/transfer any existing assets and put any surplus cash that you have to work.

Firstly, we provide you with a detailed proposal, the value that we will add through our involvement and the cost for this before giving you time to digest and make a decision.

Should you wish to proceed, we present to you our recommendations to you in the form of three documents: what you should do, how it works and what you should know. These documents encompass the detailed advice for existing assets that you have and/or what to do with excess cash that you have.

The complexity of this stage will depend on your individual situation, we endeavour to present our advice in a way that is understandable and avoid using industry jargon or acronyms. We want you to be able to digest the advice easily so that you can make an educated decision on the complex advice that we provide.

Should you agree to proceed, we ask for your signatures on the paperwork and get to work on our advice. Throughout this stage, we keep you updated regularly and answer any questions that arise. At the end of the “Realise” chapter, your assets should be arranged in the most efficient way and invested in line with your plans, with the aim being to achieve everything you inputted into your plan in the “build” stage.

Our client journey includes a catch-up meeting after the ‘Realise’ stage to review the work we have undertaken so far; answer any questions you have and discuss how you would like to engage with us on an ongoing basis.

In part four of our series, we will explore how we keep your plan on track and reflect regularly to ensure you continue write your life story. If you wish to talk to Carbon about realising your life story, please contact one of our financial planners.

The value of investments and the income derived from them can fall as well as rise. You may not get back what you invest. This communication is for general information only and is not intended to be individual advice. It represents our understanding of law and HM Revenue & Customs practice. You are recommended to seek competent professional advice before taking any action. Tax and Estate Planning Services are not regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority.