The Client Diary: Week of 20th April 2026

The Client Diary: Week of 20th April 2026

Three very different meetings this week — a deep retirement implementation session with a couple on the cusp of drawing down, an advanced planning conversation with a tech entrepreneur wrestling with crypto and corporate cash, and a coffee with a prospect who arrived frustrated and left, hopefully, with a clearer picture. Between them, they covered a remarkable amount of ground. Here are the themes that stuck with me.

The Decumulation Jigsaw

If you want to understand why retirement income planning is genuinely complex, spend ninety minutes in a meeting like the one we had mid-week.

A couple — let's call them Carl and Natasha— are entering drawdown with a layered financial structure: a SIPP, a small, self-administered pension scheme (SSAS) earmarked for wind-up, ISAs, and a chunk of cash sitting post-property sale. The work we'd done together was to map all of this into four distinct "buckets," each with a different tax treatment and a different role in the income plan.

 The withdrawal strategy we presented drew on both linear and stochastic modelling — looking at the plan through two lenses simultaneously. The stochastic model suggested a 91% probability of ending age 100 with over £3 million in liquid assets. That sounds wonderful. But the real conversation was about behavioural planning: what do you do when markets fall sharply? How much cash do you hold as what I call "crash insurance"?

 The formula we use is simple — emergency cash, known near-term costs, and six to twelve months of portfolio withdrawals sitting outside the investment pot. It's not sophisticated. It is battle-tested. I've deployed it twice with clients in real market crises, and in both cases the fact that they had the buffer meant they didn't sell investment units at the bottom.

 The point I kept returning to is that the mechanics of retirement income — the 5% bond withdrawals, the GIA, the crystallisation of pension funds — matter far less than the client's emotional relationship with market volatility. Get the cash strategy right and most of the behavioural risk disappears.

The Batting Order Has Changed

Pensions going into estates for inheritance tax from April 2027 came up in two separate meetings this week. For clients who have traditionally kept their pension funds untouched — spending ISAs and investments first, treating the pension as a legacy asset — that logic is being rapidly unpicked.

The phrase I used in one meeting was "the batting order has changed." For years, advisers encouraged clients to spend everything else first and leave the pension to pass on tax-free. That world is ending. For clients with substantial pension funds, the new calculus is to draw more from the SIPP earlier, reduce the estate's exposure to IHT, and redirect surplus into vehicles that either fall outside the estate immediately (certain trust structures, direct gifts) or where the growth has already occurred outside the taxable environment.

The seven-year clock on potentially exempt transfers is now a more urgent conversation than it was even two years ago. With the nil-rate band frozen since 2009, the annual gift allowance unchanged since 1982, and pension funds heading into the estate, this is a gathering storm for families with meaningful wealth. The 2025 Budget planted a seed; clients are only now beginning to feel the implications.

Separately it was lovely to be asked to contribute my thoughts on this subject for Holly Mackay’s (Founder and CEO of Boring Money) blog HERE.

Crypto Comes to the Investment Committee

Our Tuesday conversation was with a client I'll call Tom — a tech professional with a sharp understanding of financial markets, a sophisticated view of cryptocurrency, and about half a million pounds sitting in his company's treasury account earning 2% in a Revolut account. He knows it can do better.

What made this meeting genuinely interesting wasn't the corporate investment decision (80% equity portfolio in a company GIA, probably) — it was the conversation about whether we can accommodate a crypto exchange-traded product within an advised portfolio. Tom works in the crypto industry. He knows the products. His first choice is a staked Ethereum ETP listed on the LSE; his backstop is one of the BlackRock US Ethereum ETFs.

I had to be honest with him. Crypto doesn't feature in our current model portfolios. But I'm raising it at our investment committee in May — because Tom isn't alone. I'm seeing it from one or two clients, and the product landscape has genuinely shifted. These are regulated, listed instruments now. BlackRock's Ethereum ETF has assets in the billions. The question of whether, and how, to bring crypto exposure into an advised portfolio is no longer a fringe conversation.

The conceptual challenge is deciding what role it plays. Is it a growth asset? A diversifier? An uncorrelated hedge? Tom made the point well: "You can't be pro or anti-crypto any more than you can be pro or anti stocks. There are good ones and bad ones." That's a fair challenge. We look at risk-adjusted returns and role in the portfolio. If we can't answer what it's doing there, we shouldn't be recommending it.

Meanwhile, what struck me in that session was the chart I showed Tom of an 80%-equity portfolio performance over the past thirteen months — taking in Trump's tariff announcements and the Middle East bombing campaign in full. The return over that period, through two sharp corrections, was 14.6%. Compare that to Ethereum, which is up around 11% over the same thirty days but is down 40% from its August high. The message I kept coming back to: volatility looks very different depending on which timeframe you're standing in.

The Uncomfortable Truth

My Tuesday morning was a coffee meeting with a prospect — a retired former executive with a well known drinks company, referred by a mutual friend. I'll call him Ian.

He came in with a simple grievance: £200,000 invested with a very well known wealth manager five years ago, ISA-wrapped, no income taken. Annualised return: approximately 1.4%.

That figure stopped me. Equity markets have performed strongly over that period — our equivalent portfolio had done 7% annualised over the same period. Even a more conservative portfolio, has done 6%. To get 1.4% out of a portfolio that the client believes is invested primarily in equities requires some explanation: either the portfolio is more conservatively positioned than he was led to believe, the 2022 drawdown was severe and recovery has been slow, or fees are doing significant damage. Probably some combination of all three.

Ian told me he'd raised his risk concerns with his adviser after a sharp fall in year one, and been told it had been adjusted. He doesn't believe it was. His portfolio is currently rated 5 out of 7 on their scale — which in plain English is probably medium-high risk. He asked to be in low-medium. That gap, if accurate, is a suitability concern worth pursuing formally.

I gave him three things to take away. First, a realistic benchmark for what his portfolio should have returned — which gives him ammunition for a direct conversation with his adviser. Second, my honest view on the charges: he's paying approximately 1.5% in ongoing advice, plus additional fund costs, call it 2-2.5% total. The market average advice fee is around 0.8-1%. The drag on returns from that cost alone is meaningful. Third, a straight answer on whether we're the right firm for him right now.

That third point matters. Our minimum fee (we charge fixed monthly fees) on a £200,000 portfolio, represents around 3% a year before we've even considered investment returns. It would be self-defeating to take him on. So I told him clearly, and offered to refer him to another adviser who runs a leaner operation and works with smaller portfolios. It's not the conversation any of us relish, but the alternative — overpromising and underdelivering — is what Ian has already experienced once.

He also mentioned that his wife has a defined benefit company pension maturing in December, with a cash equivalent transfer value of around £220,000. He'd like to transfer it. I was frank with him: DB transfer advice is among the most regulated activity a financial planner can undertake, every case is reported to the FCA and to PI insurers, and most firms — mine included — have very high thresholds for taking it on. The combination of a relatively modest transfer value, a low stated risk appetite, and the looming change in pension IHT treatment means the starting presumption is that she keeps the scheme benefit. She's due to get around £600 a month guaranteed, index-linked, with a spouse's pension. That's valuable. Especially as interest rates have made transfer values lower in real terms than they were in say 2018-19.

What I found most affecting about that meeting was Ian’s comment near the end: "I've got somebody at the other end of a phone, but I've got no confidence about picking up the phone and talking to them." That sentence captures what goes wrong in some advice relationships. The relationship exists. The trust doesn't.

A Few Things That Cut Across All Three Meetings

Simplification as a retirement goal. Carl and Natasha are winding up their SSAS, consolidating ISAs onto a single platform, and trying to reduce administrative complexity. This is undervalued. People talk about returns and tax efficiency. They don't talk enough about the cognitive load of managing multiple accounts, relationships, and platforms. Getting everything under one roof — where we can pull levers and produce cash in a coordinated way — is genuinely worth something.

The concentration risk conversation. One of our clients holds a significant position in a single listed company. We can't advise on individual shares, but the general principle holds: fifteen thousand underlying companies in a diversified portfolio versus one. The risk isn't just price; it's key-man dependency, liquidity, and succession uncertainty. These conversations are uncomfortable but necessary.

The LPA gap. In two out of three meetings this week, legal documents came up. One couple has wills but no Lasting Power of Attorney in place. I keep seeing this. The LPA is the financial equivalent of flood insurance — unremarkable until you need it, and then it's everything. Worth checking with clients at every review.

If anything in this weeks diary strikes a chord with you, please feel free to get in touch via the button below.