About Us

Smart Financial Planning is a values-based financial planning company

Our clients are our priority and helping them to achieve their goals in the long term is our focus. To do this, we spend time understanding what their goals and aspirations are and what drives them. We can then set realistic and accurate goals and work to help our clients achieve them.
We look at the bigger picture. For example, we are interested in what our clients want to do in their retirement, rather than looking at the arbitrary income need for their retirement.
We structure all our activity to ensure our clients remain on target and that as circumstances, legislation and taxation change, we can adapt appropriately.
To find out more, visit the Our Clients section of the site where you can see how we work with our clients and the standards you can expect.

Who do we accept as clients?

Smart Financial Planning is a committed supporter of the Institute of Financial Planning and adheres to all of its standards and ethics. You may be surprised to find that this is not the case in the majority of firms. The Institute provide a number of guides to help clients choose their advisers and these are available for downloading from the right hand side column. Smart Financial Planning is very selective about the clients that it works with. We know who we can help and do not believe in taking clients on unless we can add significant value.

Our client relationships are for the long term and we invest enormous amounts of time and effort to help our clients achieve everything they wish. To make the relationship work, our clients need to play their part and deal professionally with us.

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What is our history?

Smart Financial Planning is the end result of 10 years of planning by Steve Martin. Steve began his career working for a traditional ‘advice’ company in Glasgow but always planned to run his own business. Steve felt that he and his team could provide a significantly better, more independent and impartial service to a relatively small number of clients than already exists in the market.

Smart was launched in October 2008 with approximately 50 clients. These clients came with Steve from his previous firm where he was a partner. A Smart team was then built around them, more details of the team can be found in the ‘Smart team’ section.

Since the launch in October 2008, the company has gone from strength to strength and taken on the target of 1 new client per month. Any more than 1 client per month would put at risk the level of service provided to our existing clients which is unacceptable.