The Client Diary: Week of 11th May 2026

Two meetings stood out this week — a home visit to a long-standing client approaching a milestone birthday, and an annual planning session with one of the most financially self-aware people I work with. Very different circumstances, different parts of the country, different chapters of life. And yet by the end of the week, I found myself turning over the same three ideas. Here they are.

When the Numbers Stop Being the Main Event

The first meeting was a home visit to a client who is approaching her 90th birthday. She is, without any doubt, one of the sharpest 89-year-olds I have ever met — and given the health challenges she has navigated in the past twelve months, the fact that she descended the garden steps with complete ease spoke volumes. We covered her portfolio, her income, her cash position, her trusts. But what I'll remember most about that morning is the conversation about what she wants to do for her 90th, and the warmth with which she talked about her family — a relationship, she made clear, that has genuinely improved. "They've grown up, finally," she said, with a smile that made it entirely a compliment.

The second meeting was with a client who is, financially speaking, in remarkable shape — a net worth comfortably above £6 million, with investments that had grown substantially while she got on with her life. But the meeting opened with a three-week safari across Tanzania, Kenya and Rwanda coming up in a matter of weeks, and the Galápagos Islands already booked for next year. She has recently joined a gym, taken on a personal trainer, decided at this stage of her life to learn to swim, and was thoroughly enjoying all of it. The money, she made perfectly clear, was absolutely fine. The life was the point.

In both cases, the financial planning was the scaffolding. Life was the building. I have learned, over nearly thirty years in this business, not to mistake the two.

The Invisible Architecture of Long-Term Planning

One of the more quietly significant conversations of the week was about something many clients never really have to engage with: the machinery that sits beneath their estate plan. In the case of my older client, we have four trust structures in place, some dating back well over a decade. They are working exactly as designed. But the family members originally named as trustees have, quite understandably, largely lost track of what they signed up for — and more importantly, what it will require of them when the time comes. Nobody is at fault. It is simply what happens when life moves on and paperwork stays still.

We discussed, calmly and practically, the case for appointing a professional trustee. My experience is consistent on this point: the grief that falls on a family in the months after a bereavement is burden enough. Adding trust administration, tax calculations, deed of appointment paperwork and legal correspondence to that grief is a false economy, even if the professional fees feel uncomfortable at the outset. Get a lawyer. Let them deal with it. It will cost you something. It will save you rather more.

My second meeting of the week produced a different flavour of the same theme. A final salary pension is due to come into payment in September. On its own, straightforward enough. But alongside property rental income, savings interest, and a pension fund that has grown well beyond the protected lifetime allowance, the combined picture pushes dangerously close to the £100,000 income threshold — the point at which the personal allowance starts to disappear and the effective marginal rate of tax can reach 60%. This is not a crisis. It is entirely manageable. But it requires careful sequencing: which pension to take, when, in which form, and how to use charitable giving and other levers to stay the right side of the line. None of this was visible in isolation. It only becomes visible when you bring all the pieces into the same room and look at them together.

Long-term planning creates structures which, if left unreviewed, accumulate complexity quietly. A periodic look at not just what you have, but who is responsible for what and how everything fits together, is time very well spent.

Staying the Course When the World Looks Alarming

Across both meetings this week, markets came up. The past twelve months have been, by most measures, a strong period — one client's defensive portfolio returned around 11%; the other, invested entirely in equities, recorded something closer to 23%. Though both of us were happy to acknowledge that the measurement starts from the low point after last year's Liberation Day tariff announcements, so the flattering arithmetic deserves a pinch of salt. The annualised picture over fourteen to fifteen years is the more honest one: 9% per annum for the equity portfolio, through the European debt crisis, Brexit, COVID, two rounds of US-China trade wars, Trump's tariffs, an actual conflict in the Middle East and the closure of the Straits of Hormuz.

What strikes me is not the number itself, impressive as it is. It is the behaviour it represents. Neither client has ever called in a panic during any of those events. Neither reached for the sell button, or asked whether we ought to move to cash. One told me, cheerfully, that she checks her bank balance once a week to make sure nothing catastrophic has happened — and that is about the extent of her engagement with market volatility. The other simply carries on.

This is, in my experience, what good financial planning actually produces. Not returns — markets produce returns. Good financial planning produces the peace of mind that allows people to stay invested long enough to receive them. That is a harder thing to engineer than it sounds, and it is not achieved by accident.

Two meetings. Two very different lives. Three ideas worth sitting with.

If any of this weeks themes resonate with you, feel free to get in touch,