About Us

Learn more about us, our team, and the financial advice we can offer you.

Meet the team

Neale is our founder.

He is a physics graduate and a Chartered Financial Planner with over fifteen years’ experience of working in financial services, both in client facing and back office research roles.

“I created Principled because I wanted to give people a choice of using a financial planner that puts ethics at the heart of every decision. Most financial planners recommend investments that ultimately cause harm to our planet and the people that inhabit it. It doesn’t need to be like this.

I also wanted to create a firm that provides genuine financial planning for our clients. We appreciate that most people have not encountered true financial planning, and our clients initially come to us to get help with a specific problem. At Principled, when we meet a client for the first time, our first job is to find out what is really important to them. Ultimately, we want to help people arrange their finances so that they are aligned with their goals. After talking to one of our financial planners about their specific problem, our clients go away with a better understanding of their finances as a whole, and a better understanding as to how they can manage their money to achieve their goals.”

The people we work with

We believe that anyone can benefit from financial planning, not just the super wealthy.

We can add value to people who are:

wondering if they are doing the right things with their money
wanting to make sustainable and ethical decisions with their money
at all stages of retirement planning, whether that be those planning ahead for future retirement, those people who are about to retire, or people who have already retired and want help to make sure their savings outlast them
wanting a review of their pensions
looking to invest cash, either for themselves or for their family
members of public sector, final salary, or CARE pension schemes
worried about inheritance tax
wanting to make their finances more tax efficient

A Principled way to pay for financial advice

We feel that it is really important that our clients understand the fees that they are paying, and the service that they are receiving in return.

Most financial advisers charge their fees by applying an arbitrary percentage figure to the value of your pension or investments. Using this approach, a person with a pension valued at £400,000 would pay four times as
much for a review of their pension, compared to someone with a fund value of £100,000.

Our Services

More about Principled

We believe that this way of charging makes no sense at all! The value of the pension has no bearing at all on the amount of work that an adviser needs to do to review it. If you took your car to the local car wash, the value of the vehicle shouldn’t have any bearing on how much you are charged for it to be cleaned!

At Principled, we take a different approach.

A modern financial planning firm such as Principled prioritises people over the value of their products. First, we need to get to know you, and find out what it is on your mind. We need to know your plans for work, for retirement, and for your family. We seek to understand your income, your expenditure, and your tax situation. We take a deep dive into what is important to you, and engage in meaningful conversations to help you identify your personal and financial goals. We review your existing financial products, including those without any monetary value such as final salary and CARE pensions. We have tough conversations with our clients to help them understand how their loved ones would cope financially if anything was to happen to them. We keep clients on the right track to meeting their personal goals, and we are the first port of call in times of trouble. We sharejoy in our clients’ successes, and we are alongside them to provide support in the low moments of their lives.

After undertaking all of this, what sense does it make to look back at the value of our client’s pension when we are setting our fees?

Are we four times as valuable to the person with a pension of £400,00 as we are to the person with pension savings of £100,000?

If a firm claims to undertake holistic financial planning but bases their fees purely on the size of your pension pot, their charging structure is not aligned with the service they claim to provide.

At Principled, we base our charges on the complexity of our clients’ financial affairs, and the work involved in providing our financial services.

We make our charges as transparent as possible, and we carefully explain the charges that will apply to our clients in advance of undertaking any work. This means our clients fully understand the fees they will pay, and the service that they will receive.