The Client Diary - Week of 16 March 2026

A reflection on the week's conversations, the questions clients are raising, and what they tell us about where people's minds are right now.

The retirement question nobody fully prepares for

This week I had three conversations with clients at or approaching retirement, and what struck me was how different the emotional experience was for each of them — even when the underlying numbers told a broadly positive story.

'“Alan” had spent a year deliberately not looking at his pension. He trusted the process, got on with his life, and arrived at our meeting with genuinely no idea what his pot was worth. When I showed him the valuation, his first response was to ask me to check the figure again. The relief that followed — when the cashflow modelling confirmed that his plan was very much on track — was something I won't forget quickly. Financial planning at its best does exactly this: it turns an unanswered question into a settled one.

'Stephen', by contrast, arrived at retirement with a meticulously maintained spending spreadsheet, a clear view of his income sources, and a significant portfolio behind him. His challenge was not the numbers — it was the emotional adjustment of watching his salary stop for the first time in his career. His wife expressed the same thing more directly: knowing intellectually that the money is there is one thing; trusting it when the pay slips stop arriving is quite another. The shift from saving to spending is as much a psychological transition as a financial one.

When the plan works — but life does not stand still

One couple I met this week — let's call them “Graham & Linda” — have spent the better part of three years unable to make a decision about their main home. The numbers make the case clearly: selling or even renting the property would transform their financial picture, turning a small annual shortfall into a meaningful surplus. The cashflow modelling showed this starkly.

But financial planning is not just about modelling. It is about understanding why decisions do not get made even when the logic is plain. In this case, a long-standing difference of opinion between two people who have very different relationships to the same property. My job in that conversation was not to tell them what to do. It was to make the financial consequences of each path as clear as possible, and to acknowledge that the decision itself belongs to them.

What the meeting also surfaced — and this is increasingly common — is the complexity that comes with assets and lives spread across multiple countries. Wills in three jurisdictions. Tax residency questions in two. Pension nominations that hadn't been updated in years. These are the details that matter enormously and that often go unaddressed in the absence of a prompt.

The entrepreneur's dilemma

My final meeting of the week was with 'Harry', a client whose financial situation is almost entirely defined by his next venture. He has stepped back from his previous financial goals — financial independence, a specific level of passive income — and acknowledged, with real self-awareness, that those goals were never really his. His nature is to build things. The financial plan has to work with that, not against it.

The practical question we focused on was what to do with a significant cash holding sitting inefficiently while he waits to see whether his new fund raises successfully. The answer — keep it simple, keep it accessible, keep it safe — is not glamorous. But for someone whose energy and attention is rightly consumed by a high-stakes business launch, a boring cash plan is exactly the right answer.

This week in markets — what clients are asking, and what I'm thinking

Markets have been difficult to ignore this week. Escalating tensions in the Middle East — including disruption to the Strait of Hormuz and a sharp rise in oil prices — have driven a notable divergence across global markets. European and Asian equities have sold off meaningfully, while US markets have shown relative resilience. Closer to home, gilt yields have moved sharply higher and gold has spiked, both reflecting the classic flight-to-safety pattern that emerges when geopolitical uncertainty becomes acute.

Two questions came up in almost every meeting this week, in slightly different forms.

The first: is this the moment to do something? The honest answer is that nobody — including professional investors with access to far more information than most of us — reliably knows whether a geopolitical shock is a temporary disruption or the start of something more structural. History suggests the former is far more common than the latter. The right question is not 'what should I do about what is happening?' but 'is my portfolio positioned in a way that can withstand what I don't know is coming?' If the answer is yes, staying the course is usually the right answer. If the answer is no, a market shock is rarely the right moment to fix it.

The second: how exposed am I to technology, and is this an AI bubble? This came up directly in one meeting where a client's son raised the concern thoughtfully and with genuine curiosity. It is a reasonable question. The honest answer is that today's technology-heavy indices look different from the bubble of 2000 in one important respect: the dominant companies are, for the most part, enormously profitable and cash-generative. That does not mean they cannot fall — they have, and they will again. But the comparison with a period defined by loss-making businesses trading on speculation about future revenues is not quite right. That said, concentration risk is always worth examining. A genuinely diversified portfolio — spread across thousands of companies, sectors, and geographies — behaves very differently from one that has quietly accumulated a large technology tilt without anyone noticing.

The broader point, and one worth repeating: periods of market stress are uncomfortable, but they are not extraordinary. They are a routine feature of investing over any meaningful timeframe. The clients I worry least about during weeks like this are the ones who are invested in line with a clear plan, whose time horizons are long, and who have enough liquidity that they do not need to sell anything at the wrong moment. The clients who face the greatest risk are those who are either over-concentrated in a single theme or holding too much in cash that is quietly being eroded by inflation — and who therefore feel pressure to act when the noise is loudest.

Living the dream

As if by magic, whilst thinking how best to sign off this blog - I received a simple one line email from a client holidaying in Barbados which pretty much defines why I enjoy my job so much!

“Having a beer on the beach. Retirement is great with good financial advice. Cheers”

If any of the themes covered here strike a chord with you or your looking for some fresh thinking to your own situation feel free to get in touch via the button below.