What Would We Do With Our Lives If We Retired?
Lynda Croome is a Chartered Financial Planner and Independent Financial Adviser with over 30 years’ experience. Her first goal is to understand your objectives so that she can work with you to build a financial plan to realise your future vision. In this consultative process she draws out what is important to you, learning about your financial position and priorities to establish and recommend your next move.
A couple in their 50s run a successful business, and have no children. They told me that they didn’t think they would ever retire.
I was interested. Lack of retirement finance wasn’t the issue, so I asked them whether they had ever considered what they would do with their time if they did retire.
It was as though I had opened a door they had never considered walking through. The ideas for what they would do with financial freedom came thick and fast, including volunteering for charities they cared about.
This is a big part of my job as a financial planner and independent financial adviser. It’s the ‘life first, money second’ approach. I ask the questions that, sometimes, people have never thought to ask themselves, and help them to build a picture of what life would look like with financial freedom. Then we look together at how to achieve it.
This couple loved running their business, but also relished the idea of having choices in the future. So our first goal became to work together on a financial plan that would allow them to stop work without financial implications, and which includes financial protections in case one of them becomes unable to work or dies prematurely.
With some inherited money in the mix, they also wanted to understand their own position with future inheritance tax (IHT). Without children to leave their estate to, they weren’t overly concerned, but we looked at strategies for making their estate more tax-efficient by including charity bequests and lifetime giving.