Robert O’Connell

Hi. My name is Robert O’Connell, I’ve been a client of The Cosgrove Partnership for just over 12 months now. My adviser with The Cosgrove Partnership is Matt.

I was considering taking a financial adviser, and a recommendation by friends came about and we made contact. The reason was, as I’m planning for retirement, it was then two years ahead, I wanted some advice.

Now, I’ve been in the motor industry for over 40 years and consider myself to be an expert on my subject. But I’m not an expert on pensions or financial advice. And I thought it better to turn to somebody who is an expert, who could listen to where we are financially, what set up we have and give us options and choices about the future and about retirement.

When we first met Matt, both my wife and I took to him, his style was relaxed and easygoing. He made us feel involved, the questions he asked me made me think about our finances in a slightly different way to how we were thinking about it. We were both delighted with his approach, delighted with the questions and it was a very simple decision to go with Matt.

The best thing for me with working with Matt and The Cosgrove Partnership has been somebody else taking away the burden of work of contacting all the pension companies, having to write to them, making the changes to the funds, that I would have had to do an awful lot of work and research to decide what to do. That’s been the biggest issue.

I’m very comfortable with the plan that Matt’s put down in front of us. We’re very comfortable with some of the concepts he’s put across that we are likely to spend more in our early years of retirement, or as Matt put it, our 52 weeks a year holiday. And that our spending needs will be less as we grow older, we completely understand that and we’re very comfortable with the plan.

Three words to describe the relationship with Matt, planned, open, and personable.

The best piece of advice from Matt and the partnership has been around our mortgage. Our mortgage is called an offset mortgage. So effectively, it’s an interest only mortgage. Matt pointed out that actually to pay that mortgage and the amount of money I was paying a month, I was paying 40% tax on that. And that if I actually stopped paying that and just paid the monthly interest and instead put the money into my pension, that when we draw down the pension we’d be paying significantly less tax on the money.

I’ve recommended him to friends and family to get financial advice because of the work over the last 12 months with Matt, related to the mortgage, related to how we draw cash down and the whole planning around retirement and when you’ll need money and when you’ll need to spend less money. For those reasons I’d recommend Matt.