Our Post-Exam Review of the January 2018 CII R06 Exam
Last updated on September 25th, 2019 at 4:23 am
The CII have released the R06 exam paper from their January sitting, so it’s time to look at our pre-exam analysis and see how well we predicted the questions. This is helpful reading for those who are revising for the CII R06 exam.
If you haven’t seen the paper yet, you can access it here.
Case Study 1
Case study 1 focused on Suresh and Anya, a recently married couple with no children, who had recently started their first jobs. Suresh was employed with a salary of £31,000 p.a. and a member of his employer’s workplace pension scheme and Anya was employed with a salary of £35,000. They lived with Anya’s mother to save for their first home. They had some savings but also credit card debt.
Their goals were described as:
- Save for a deposit for the purchase of their first home
- Ensure they are financially protected in the event of long-term illness or disability
- Repay their credit card debts
- Put in place an investment strategy for their long-term retirement planning.
The paper started, this time, with a question asking candidates to outline the key factors that a Financial Adviser should consider when putting in place a suitable investment strategy for their retirement planning. We had covered the process an adviser should follow, which included relevant detail such as ATR and capacity for loss, emergency fund, tax position etc – all of which are factors that could have been used to answer this question.
Next, candidates were asked to state the benefits and drawbacks of using their savings to repay their credit card debt and again we had covered this – albeit specifically using their premium bonds but the answers equally applied to their cash savings too.
The case study had mentioned they were interested in SRI so although not specifically a goal, there was bound to be a question on it. Candidates had to list the key areas for investment which are typically excluded by SRI and five drawbacks of using a SRI strategy. These exact questions had been asked before, so we are pleased to say we had them covered in full.
The recommend and justify question for Case Study 1 was on providing a suitable protection policy for Anya to provide her with a regular income in the event of long-term illness. In our generic section we have a whole section on protection products, which of course includes income protection, but we had also provided the information in the form of a recommend and justify table for Income Protection in the main body of the analysis too.
Further questions asked for the benefits of their remaining as members of their respective employer’s pension schemes – we had 8 of the 10 marks covered – and also employer obligations in respect of their re-joining, which we also had covered in a section on the basic information regarding workplace pensions.
The paper continued with the key benefits of using a LISA to save for a home for 10 marks, and we are pleased to say we had 15 bullets points explaining how they could use a LISA which could easily have been adapted to pull out the key benefits.
Finally, candidates were asked to state seven key benefits of receiving ongoing financial advice, and this we also had fully covered in our generic section.
Case Study 1 should have been a walk in the park for anyone using our analysis.
Here's a review of the January 18 CII R06 exam paper - useful for focusing your revision. Share on X
Case Study 2
So how did we do with Case Study 2? This focused on Adam and Kathryn, with 2 adult children and 4 grandchildren, considering taking early retirement. Adam was employed with a salary of £60,000 and a member of a DB scheme, and Kathryn was employed part-time with a salary of £18,000.
Their financial aims were described as:
- Ensure they have sufficient income in retirement
- Ensure that, if Adam pre-deceases Kathryn, she has sufficient income for her needs
- Mitigate any potential IHT on second death
- Improve the tax efficiency of their income and investments
Out of the 7 questions asked, we missed 2 of them: question d(ii) the benefits of settling money into a DGT and b(i) describe how Adam’s maximum tax relievable pension contribution for the current year is determined. These questions had a total of 14 marks.
The remaining questions we had covered in full or in part: the ones we had covered in full included the fact-finding question for 12 marks; the suitability of their savings and investments for 7 marks; the actions they could take to improve the tax efficiency of their savings and investment for 12 marks and the actions they could take to reduce their potential IHT liability for 8 marks. The rest, we covered in part but probably didn’t give enough information for the full marks on offer, however they were on subjects which we are confident that a student would have been able to use their knowledge to answer well.
All in all, it was a fair paper with only one or two curve balls, but the marks had been set so if no preparation had been done for those particular questions that would not have meant a fail.
Grab the resources you need!
If you’re studying for your CII R06 exam, and you’re wanting to feel more confident on exam day, grab our free taster analysis to try out one of Brand Financial Training’s resources for yourself. Click the link to download the R06 case study analysis taster now!
