Monday
My week starts with a meeting in Shropshire (where my main offices are based) with a potential new estate agent introducer. We meet in a local pub over coffee and discuss how Carl Summers Financial Services can help her clients find the most appropriate mortgages, along with the full range of support services we offer to help make the mortgage and conveyancing process as smooth as possible.
Then it is over to my Telford office to catch up on emails and return some phone calls before heading out to a 4pm meeting. This client has been with me for more than eight years and is now looking to move to a bigger house. I update his file and we discuss what he has been considering buying. I then agree to research some options and get back to him. Finally, the drive home to Leicester (it is only 80 miles).
Tuesday
A day working from home and it is a big admin catch-up day; lots of research to get done following yesterday’s meeting and meetings from last week. As hard as it can be trying to navigate through lenders' criteria, it is rewarding when you know you have a great solution for a client.
Late in the day I have an appointment with a client to discuss their protection needs to sit alongside the mortgage they applied for last week. The new personal protection reports we use are great at making protection real for clients so we can get a solution agreed and the applications done straight away.
Wednesday
A bit of a different day today as its Openwork’s Mortgage and Protection Roadshow at the National Motorcycle Museum. I attend with the rest of my colleagues from the practice. I really enjoy these events and get a lot from them. It is a brilliant opportunity to catch up with lenders, or insurers I have not seen for a while and to get a flavour of things on the horizon for all of us in the network.
There is a great session on later life lending from Hodge Lifetime and Key Retirement. I can see us looking at these as solutions for clients on a regular basis in the coming years. Before we all head our separate ways I have a chat with the practice principals, Carl and Spencer, in which I discuss our website and digital marketing strategy. (This is all very new for us.)
I get back home in the late afternoon and answer the usual backlog of emails and return calls, before heading out to help celebrate my niece’s 11th birthday. She has chosen to go to the local Indian restaurant, good girl. Pint of Kingfisher, please.
Thursday
A chance to chase up outstanding queries with lenders and finalise the research I was doing on Tuesday. I also follow up on the protection applications from Tuesday – unfortunately life cover is rated (which I expected) and income protection is declined for one of them (a little less expected).
I contact the clients and they accept the rating as it was in line with our estimates and I recommend short-term income protection to replace the declined application. It is not medically underwritten so sidesteps the issue for the clients, even though it has a narrower scope of cover.
I have a late afternoon meeting with an existing client looking to remortgage his current property on a buy-to-let mortgage. What seems a simple case rapidly turns out to be anything but. This one is going to be a challenge.
Friday
No client meetings today, so a great chance to clear the decks ready for the weekend. I always seem to have a couple of long-standing problem cases at any one time and Fridays are a good time to pick them up and try to move them forward. At present I have a remortgage with transfer of equity, which is potentially going to generate a large SDLT bill, due to the clients having a holiday home and a key man plan that has been declined by the insurer.
I am also on the board of the Association of Mortgage Intermediaries, so I spend some of the afternoon reading the latest papers we are sending out – today it is AMI’s response to FCA CP16/42, exciting stuff.
Finally I end the day as I do all Fridays – I email an update on leads received, actioned and business generated to my main estate agent introducer. Now I can hear some red wine calling to be liberated from the bottle it is trapped in.
Scott Taylor-Barr is a financial adviser of Carl Summers Financial Services based in Shropshire
