Former Buckingham Gate financial planner Peter Ditchburn has launched a duo of firms under the brand Deep Dive.
The businesses – which were established in November 2023 – focus on estate and financial planning for whole families, rather than “looking at things in silos”.
Deep Dive Financial Planning is an appointed representative of 2plan Wealth Management – a sister company of Openwork, for whom Ditchburn has worked in the past.
It offers independent financial advice and is registered by the Financial Conduct Authority.
Meanwhile, Deep Dive Estate Planning advises on wills, trust frameworks, powers of attorney and deeds of variation.
All recommended trust frameworks are authorised under the Solicitors Regulation Authority.
When Ditchburn moved to Buckingham Gate in 2019, he spent three years giving independent advice that focused on later-life planning inheritance tax.
“I pretty quickly became only interested in dealing with people with later life-planning concerns,” he said.
“Choosing to specialise in that way allows you to really focus the service you provide and deal with everyone in the way they want to be dealt with.”
Why Deep Dive?
“It was in 2022. I was actually on holiday in Thailand doing my scuba dive master training.
“This training is usually completed by young people on a gap year who’ve got three months to spare and want to live in the backpacker hostel around the corner from the scuba shop.
“It had been a bucket-list item of mine for about a decade. The problem is, getting three months off work to go and live like a beach bum is not going to go down well when you’ve got a job.
“I rang the scuba school and said I can just about wangle four weeks off work. Can we get the training done in four weeks?
“They said yes, but we’re not quite sure why you’d want to do that, because most people say it’s the best time of their life. So three months is better than four weeks.
“As a dive master, you’re not an instructor. But you’re the first professional level of diving.
“The job that you have is you take people down and show them around underwater when they’ve already got the basic qualification themselves.
“You have three jobs: you’re there to keep them safe; to ensure that they have a good time; and to stop them getting lost or distracted.
“It didn’t take long before it clicked that that’s also what you do as a retirement planning adviser.”
Currently, Ditchburn is the sole adviser for both Deep Dive Financial Planning and Deep Dive Estate Planning. He looks after around 35 families.
“I consider each family to be a single client unit because a large part of what I do is joining the dots between the different generations,” Ditchburn told Money Marketing.
Many of the families Ditchburn advises are ones he has known from his first job at Nationwide Building Society in 2010.
“We tend to take on the senior generation at the family in the first instance because they’re the ones that are most interested in generational inheritance tax planning,” he said.
“Then we will meet the children, who are usually in their 60s themselves. And we want to join up the planning process.
“If something happens to capacity for the older generation, it is really important that the people making decisions for them know their adviser.
“Even though I’m primarily dealing with people in later life, the nature of this way of working means that I end up dealing with the whole family. I’ve even got a few people in their 20s and 30s on the books.”
Leap of faith: Why I started my own advice firm this year
Ditchburn plans to grow the financial planning business via the estate planning side.
Estate planning, he said, tends to be more transactional. “It’s about getting the family sorted out with wills, trusts and powers of attorney.
“That’s a good initial conversation and a good way of getting the word out.
“If you do a good job for a couple that need their estate planning sorted, then naturally you’re going to meet the people that they’ve nominated as trustees and the people who are part of that planning.
“In that way, we’ll build the long-term financial planning relationships.”
In terms of fees, the first £1.25m for the family is a flat tier of 2% initial, and 1% annual.
For everything above £1.25m, there is no initial fee. Everything from £1.25m to £5m, Deep Dive charges 0.5% annually. Above £5m, the firm charges 0.3% a year.
The businesses currently have four team members working across both. Two additional staff members work on the estate planning side.
It is also recruiting for an advice associate.
“This will not be a full-blown adviser who’s responsible for new business, because we think it is important to have a qualified and experienced chartered financial planner for that. At the moment, that would be me,” said Ditchburn.
“We’re looking for someone to work across all areas of the business and have exposure to each team member, and effectively help the cases go through as efficiently as possible.”
Further in the future, Ditchburn would like to recruit more advisers.
Intergenerational planning is a key focus for advisers at the moment.
Leader: Why would firms allow intergenerational assets to walk out of the door?
According to the Office for National Statistics, £5.5trn is set to be transferred between the generations as either inheritance or gifts over the next 20 to 30 years.
In November last year, Scottish Widows’ Investor Confidence Barometer showed that 91% of advisers who responded to the survey are worried about losing assets in the so-called ‘great wealth transfer’.
It also found 57% of advisers expect to retain services for a minority of their clients’ dependents upon the death of the client.
Most interesting…would like to meet these guys…
Lol…Seniors hardly want 18-22 year olds advising or introducing!
Most people like and want ‘through life protection’ whether a holiday – bonded NOT insured – or long waaranties upon major purchases, E.g. Cars.
THat some advisers, many it seems, think they will lose out by succession is nothing more than a job poorly planned.
Whilst, of course, there IS an emotional element regarding, errm..succession (death), most are willing to discuss a common aim, and at least, keep as much from FoD!
THeir focus fits with both the mood music and mortality profile of UK…and successful planning and advice is as much based upon legislation, tax, and structuring, not expensive fund management – real returns now vs projected ethereal!!
Hi John, thanks for your comment. You can find out more and book a meeting at http://www.deep-dive.co.uk
Pete has been involved in giving advice for 15 years so it is great to see that he has started these two businesses and I’m sure they will go from strength to strength.
The intergenerational transfer of wealth is quite a complicated area of planning and involves navigating not just the legal/tax/legislation issues but really around the families themselves. Treating everyone as one unit and getting the family involved in discussions at an early stage is a great way to ensure that clients hard earned money is actually used (and can be given during their lifetime with them seeing the impact of this).
This is what real financial planning is all about. Well done Pete!
Thanks James! I’ll be sure to keep you updated