Claire & Gavin

Gavin

Hi, I’m Gavin and this is my wife, Claire. We were introduced to Richard Meats at Tudor Franklin about six or seven years ago by our solicitor when we went to talk about Powers of Attorney and Inheritance Tax.

Over the course of our lives, we gradually accrued a reasonable amount of money and I managed all of that and then became more uncomfortable managing it as we approached retirement age. We also wanted to get advice about pensions, Lifetime Allowance, Annual
Allowance, tax bills, and Inheritance Tax issues. So, all of that added up to needing a financial adviser and Richard seemed to be a perfect fit.

One of the reasons we went to Tudor Franklin and Richard was that Claire was getting increasingly concerned about the complexity of our financial affairs because we have investments, buy-to-let properties, and we run a company, and Claire felt that if I wasn’t around, she wouldn’t really know where to start in terms of sorting that out.

Claire

I’m a bit of a worrier and I really felt that I wanted somebody to turn to if something happened to Gavin, somebody who I could trust and who knew our financial situation and could help me manage it.

Gavin

I think we first got in contact with Richard because we wanted somebody to look after our financial affairs and advise us about where we should go as we approached retirement. Also, if something happened to me because I ran most of the financial affairs of the family, we wanted someone who could help Claire cope with that eventuality.

Claire

I wanted to feel that I could approach him, and I certainly can. Richard is very easy to talk to and he’s very flexible in terms of meeting up. He absolutely gets our work schedules and will do his best to fit in with them.

Gavin

When we first met Richard, he was very personable and clearly very knowledgeable. We went through all of our financial affairs, and he had a perfectly sensible approach, which chimed with my approach at the time.

Richard has been really helpful in terms of making us sit down on a regular basis and look at our finances, and if there are holes in them, what we should be doing to fix those holes and where we should be going in terms of the broader picture. He’s been good at talking to both Claire and me about where we want to be going and how we achieve that.

Claire

The three words I’d use to describe Richard are knowledgeable, approachable, and flexible.

Gavin

We’d definitely recommend Richard to other people. He’s been really helpful for us in terms of getting a grasp of our finances overall. We’ve had joint meetings with him and our accountant, which have gone really well, and it feels like he’s somebody you could discuss your financial issues with. Having somebody who could talk to me about all of that and make sure I wasn’t missing something is the main reason why talking to Richard has been really reassuring.