Steve's story

My name is Steve Oldfield. I’ve known Sylvan for three years, and our adviser is Jane Patrick.

I had a contact who was a financial adviser who had retired; this is going back three years now, and he recommended Sylvan to me.

Three years ago, I had recently retired from business. I was part owner and finance director of a manufacturing company in Manchester; we’d been bought out, and as a result of that, I had a significant sum to invest to see us through our retirement.

We chose Sylvan in the end because of the personal nature of the service from Jane. We felt that she was – and this has played out in reality – going to give us a very dedicated personal service, which is what we were looking for, as well as obviously being totally professional and good with her advice.

One of the things that we really liked about the start of the process, when we first engaged with Jane at Sylvan was the cashflow planning. This was a completely new era for us, moving into retirement, and it was really useful to have Jane guide us through that.

Cashflow planning helped us because we found it difficult to understand what our level of income might be going into retirement, what our needs might be for certain capital projects that we had in mind, and putting all of that together, how that would work with inflation and market performance. We were able to look at it with Jane, and we were pretty confident that there was plenty of room for that to work for us and get on with the plan.

Working with Sylvan makes us feel at ease and confident about our finances. It’s not something we want to dwell on every minute of the day but now and again when thoughts of finances cross our mind, we’re always confident that things have been well dealt with.

One of the things we like about the Sylvan service is the Sylvan client portal, where you can log on at any time of day and look at the performance of your investments. It is also a means of contacting Sylvan if there’s something not too urgent as well. So, it’s a really useful tool.

We feel confident about our financial future working hand in hand with Sylvan. We have a very long-term plan with them and some short-term objectives as well, and our experience so far has been nothing but fantastic; we’re very confident.

The three words I would use to describe Sylvan are professional, approachable, and trustworthy.

I particularly like the fact that Jane is so approachable. We speak to her probably three or four times per year or something along those lines. Sometimes that’s on an ad hoc basis, so it’s very easy to pick up the phone and call her on her mobile; she always answers and is always ready to help us with whatever we need.

I would absolutely recommend Sylvan to anyone who asks me; the main reason is that they are well-placed to give very good financial advice. They have a fantastic team with strength and depth; they’re approachable and they do a fantastic job.