“Financial planning shouldn’t be a mystery. I help you cut through the complexity so you can make confident decisions about your future.”
Discovering economics at university felt like a light switching on. Suddenly, all those things you didn’t learn in school – inflation, tax, investments – had a logic to them. The realisation that these concepts weren’t complicated, they just weren’t explained properly, stayed with me.
Before becoming an adviser, I worked as an administrator dealing with property inside pensions. While I understood the technical side, my role meant I couldn’t offer the guidance people really needed, which was quite frustrating. I wanted to use what I knew to make a real difference, so I moved to Mattioli Woods into an advisory role.
To understand what being a financial adviser really means can be difficult. However, a good example is when I worked with a recently bereaved client whose husband had handled all the finances for the last thirty years. When he passed away, she didn’t just lose her partner – she lost the person who paid the bills, who understood the structures, and made all the financial decisions. I spent considerable time with her, walking through everything in plain language, no jargon, helping her understand what was in place and why. She told me more than once that I’d helped her through an incredibly difficult year. That’s what this work is really about.
One of the most common pieces of planning I engage in is for people approaching retirement. Many have accumulated multiple pensions over the years and come to me wanting to know what they have, when they can retire and crucially how much they can spend. Often, they’re pleasantly surprised. I’ve had clients who continued working because they genuinely didn’t think they had enough for the retirement they wanted. Following a full review, it turned out they had more than they thought. This leads to retiring earlier than planned and starting to do the things they’d always dreamed of such as seeing the world or spending more time with their families.
As an easy-going person I can talk to anyone, whether that’s accountants and solicitors who know the technical language, or someone who’s never dealt with finances before. I’m good at taking complicated concepts and explaining them in ways that make sense to different people. Financial planning affects everyone, but it shouldn’t require a degree to understand your own situation.
My experience with family life has taught me that good financial planning starts with the same fundamentals regardless of your situation: protection against worst-case scenarios, disciplined budgeting, clear goal setting, and working backwards from your goals to create the right strategy. Whether you’re planning around children, travel, early retirement, or other priorities, the process remains consistent and flexible.
If I were giving advice to a young family like mine the conversation would start with protection. Make sure the family is covered against worst-case scenarios such as death, illness or being unable to work. After that, it’s about being disciplined with budgeting, understanding your goals, and calculating how to save in the most efficient way. In five years, you want to see a family protected and significantly closer to their objectives.
One thing I try to teach – whether to clients or my stepson – is delayed gratification. It’s one of the most valuable lessons in financial planning, but also one of the hardest. However, with good budgeting and good saving habits you can start laying those foundations.
Outside of work, my family and I spend as much time outdoors as we can – walking, camping, and getting out into nature. It’s where I reset, gain perspective, and remind myself what all this planning is really for.
