Are the benefits of hiring a financial adviser limited to chasing higher returns on your money? Certainly not. Having a dedicated financial partner can help bring you closer to the future that you envision for your family. This will have a positive impact on your financial wellbeing, both now and into the future. The journey of life will throw up challenges and having a trusted financial adviser on your team will be a great asset during the tough times.

But does it go beyond ‘financial wellbeing’? It certainly can. Finances, bluntly money, touches so many aspects of our lives. For a great number of people, this is a cause of stress, sometimes consciously, sometimes not. It is not as simple as saying, “if I had more money, I would have less stress”; often the contrary. So one key benefit of having a good financial adviser, one who “gets” you, is that when there are many possible aspects of your finances that are stressing you, these can be reduced or alleviated in a number of ways.

A financial adviser is there to listen. Often through discussion and understanding, many issues can be resolved. A financial adviser is there to help you plan. The process of gazing into the future and discussing how that might look often throws up ideas, dreams and aspirations as well as challenges, concerns and worries. Committing all of this to paper, ie out of your head, is often a huge relief. David Allen, in his book Getting Things Done, talks about a concept of our “Psychic RAM” getting clogged by trying to keep too much in our minds. Busy people can get very stressed for this reason alone.

A financial plan that goes beyond trying to maximise your pension balance and prepares you for the unexpected adds great value on your life journey. A financial adviser will take you through a detailed discussion of risk. Many people feel anxiety about the risks they are exposed to, and risks they are not even aware of. Understanding the principle of risk and its practical applications to your life, both positive and negative, can remove a great deal of latent worry, giving a sense of assurance. Identifying and qualifying a long list of real or potential risks that a family faces can be a frightening exercise as you start. But as your adviser helps you implement mitigation and protection as appropriate for those risks with negative outcomes, you then can also purposefully embrace risk to work towards your goals.

Having a vision of your family’s future, particularly written down in a document, gives that vision great power. With your financial adviser, you can then set a series of goals and objectives that lead to your vision, that bring it to life. Goal setting can be short term or long term; they can change over time to reflect that ever-changing reality of our lives. The power and the value of having a financial adviser is multi-layered here. They can help you set goals to get you heading in the right direction. They will regularly review your progress, helping you to stay accountable and coaching you along the way. When the time comes to re-evaluate, your financial adviser will again be there to talk you through the required corrective action, or to set a new set of stretch targets for you to build on your existing success.

None of this is to in any way dismiss or diminish the huge amount of value that having a financial adviser brings to your bottom line. Providing clients absolute clarity of the present and future finances is of huge value. Ensuring that clients have the structural safety they need to ride out life’s ups and downs is of huge value. Working with the clients to maximise the growth in their wealth is a crucial outcome.

A great financial adviser will help their clients to evolve from being savers into successful investors. By having done the work on the financial plan and discussed and gauged risk appetite, your financial adviser will be able to construct a bespoke portfolio of investments with you. This will be proactively optimised through ensuring that taxes are minimised, costs kept to a minimum, and that the risks and timeframes for different objectives are separately evaluated.

So what if financial markets go through (yet another) upheaval? For those who are not involved in finance directly, and even for many people who are, these are not straight forward matters. The media loves a headline, and doom seems to outsell quite positivity, so the press will often be a great source of stress. If you have a financial adviser, you will know what you need to be looking out for, and what to ignore. You will have a plan that means you can focus your attention on achieving what you can control, not reacting to the latest headline. A good financial adviser will often be of great value when you need an emotional guardrail to help you stay the course. Great communication is always essential to the trusted adviser relationship and your financial adviser will be in touch as developments in the world around us take shape. Having a number you can call, a friendly familiar voice and someone that has your best interests at heart is a huge relief to many.

When times are good, when opportunities present themselves, the same friendly voice at the end of the phone will be there to give you an outside perspective and advise on possible implications. Being able to model the impact of a decision on your financial plan, often in real time, often able to ask “what if” and generate a revised plan as you need it, can efficiently answer a key set of questions before you make the decision to go ahead or not. It is worth noting that even world champions in their fields, Roger Federer, the great tennis player for example, have a coach.

Can having a financial adviser help you to get higher returns on your money? Yes, but usually that is caveated by an assessment of risk and how you are tracking towards your goals. Can having a financial adviser help with your overall financial wellbeing? Absolutely.

Further, your financial adviser will be there to listen and coach, to plan and reflect, to help you through the tough times and champion your success in the good times.