FAQS.

 Based in central Scotland and covering clients the length and breadth of the UK, we are proud to provide pension/wealth and mortgage/protection advice to a broad range of clients. We thrive on referrals and maintaining long standing relationships with clients. We believe that providing a professional service in a friendly manner with your best outcome are our core values. Our advisers ( Robert & Kevin) have over 35 years industry experience between them. We offer a variety of meeting styles, from home/office appointments to online meetings as we value your time as much as you do. There is no one size fits all for clients or advisers, we will always strive to find the best way to help you in the manner that suits. We are proud to be part of the Quilter Financial Planning network, and the financial strength and support that provides us with.

We live in an ever increasingly complex world where financial services are at our fingertips, however working together with qualified professionals allows you to destress this world. We can help with you building wealth, pension provision, and the challenging aspects of taking your pension provision at retirement/hybrid retirement in the most tax efficient manner available to you. We will help you get on and remain on the property ladder from first time buyers to those downsizing at retirement and everything in between.

Initial consultations are always provided at our expense, depending on the type of work involved beyond that, advice fees will always be agreed in writing at the outset and we offer one off and ongoing services, dependent on your needs. We can accept fees facilitated by providers, or paid direct by clients. We are also typically paid by commission from providers for insurance products and for mortgages.

At St Clair Financial Planning, we believe in professional fees for professional services. When you need a mortgage, there will be the cheapest lender (the bank offering you the lowest rate), the lender most generous on affordability (the bank who will lend you the most) and the quickest lender (the bank able to issue you a formal mortgage offer in 5 days instead of 8 weeks) and those will almost always be 3 different lenders. Those different lenders will all have different criteria and rules that have to be met prior to them agreeing to lend to you, we have excellent, long lasting relationships with UK Banks, Building Societies and specialist lenders. Our fees cover the specialist advice needed to get the right money, to the right people at the right time.

There are 3 ways a lender can assess your income:

1. Salary & Dividends
2. Salary & Share of Profit Before Corporation Tax
3. Salary & Share of Profit After Corporation Tax

Then, there are 3 different ways lenders will decide how much of it to use:

1. Latest Year Only
2. Average of last 2 years
3. Average of last 3 years

Then, different lenders have different maximum Loan to Income Multiples from 4x Income to 5.5x Income.

And all of those different lenders have different interest rates and service timescales.

This means you could find that NatWest will lend you £300,000 and HSBC will lend you £3,000,000

The usual first step is work out the max you can afford, get pre-approved with that lender, and then once you have found a property and know how much you need to borrow we re-assess which lender is going to be best for you.