The Client Diary — Week of 21st September 2026

After a week of conferences and adviser workshops in Germany, it was a pleasure to get back to what the job is actually about: sitting at kitchen tables with clients I've known for years. Three annual planning meetings in two days, all within a few miles of each other on the coast, and three very different sets of circumstances.

Three themes ran through all of them.

The money is moving down, not out

Every single conversation this week was, at its heart, about the next generation.

One widowed client wants to treat her two children identically — one has just come through a divorce and has already had help with a house purchase; the other lives abroad and is about to receive the same. Neither gift is really about the money. It's about fairness, and about being seen to be fair.

The bigger opportunity sat quietly in the background: her late husband's pension, untouched since he died, and outside her estate only until April 2027 when the rules change. There's a version of this where the whole pot comes out tax-free and goes to the children as a gift from their father. That framing matters to her far more than the tax saving does.

Another couple, comfortable and secure, have no immediate gifting plans at all — their children are doing well and the school fees are covered. But they hold bond segments that could one day be gifted to grandchildren rather than encashed by them. A third couple are ten years from downsizing, and the whole point of the downsize is to free up capital to pass on while they're still around to watch it land.

I said to one client that around 60% of my clients are now regularly moving money down the generations. That felt like a big number when I said it out loud. It isn't. It's the great wealth transfer, and it's happening at kitchen tables, not in headlines.

Takeaway: Start the gifting conversation earlier than feels comfortable. North of 75 is late if the liquidity and the intention were both there at 65.

Don't let the tax tail wag the investment dog

Two portfolios this week are not what I would build from scratch. Both are staying exactly as they are.

One holds roughly half a million pounds of unrealised gain, much of it inherited from a previous adviser. On paper, the client's risk questionnaire points to a lower-equity portfolio. Rebalancing into it would trigger a capital gains bill in the hundreds of thousands. So we're leaving it, and managing the risk a different way — with a cash buffer big enough to cover around twelve months of income, so we can simply switch withdrawals off if markets fall hard.

Elsewhere, two older investment bonds have drifted well above their intended risk level and have underperformed despite holding more in growth assets. The fix isn't clever — it's simplification. One moves to a single multi-manager fund that rebalances itself. The other strips out the fiddly bits and goes back to a clean global-plus-UK split. Meanwhile the encashment is being spread across tax years to keep one spouse inside the basic rate band and under the £100,000 threshold where the personal allowance starts to disappear.

The same client also raised the savings rate increases coming next April. If you hold anything meaningful outside an ISA, that's a conversation worth having before the tax year turns.

And a recurring source of genuine distress: Excess Reportable Income. One client told me it "freaks her out" — she's being taxed on income she never received. She isn't wrong to find it baffling. It's badly explained, badly presented, and it lands with no pound signs on the page.

Takeaway: The optimal portfolio on a spreadsheet and the right portfolio after tax are often two different things. And if a client can't explain their tax bill, we haven't finished the job.

The quiet inbox is the real risk questionnaire

Not one of these clients emailed me during a year that included a market drop on the back of conflict in the Middle East, ongoing noise around AI valuations, and a general sense that the world is coming apart.

One, a former institutional investor, put it best: there's no point panicking, because you're not going to do anything about it anyway. Another sleeps perfectly well — what keeps her awake is her daughter, not her portfolio.

Contrast that with a client I saw some years ago whose questionnaire said she'd tolerate a 20% fall. Her portfolio was down 2% and she had tears in her eyes.

Psychometric scores tell you something. What clients actually do during a drawdown tells you considerably more. And underneath both sits capacity — which is why the couple with a guaranteed, index-linked pension underpin can afford to be relaxed, while the couple with a ferocious withdrawal rate and no cash reserves need 40% in bonds whether their temperament demands it or not.

Takeaway: Risk tolerance, capacity for loss and observed behaviour are three different things. Score all three. The cash buffer is usually the most effective risk control you own.

And one last thing

A recurring gentle argument this week: spend more. One client's portfolio grew by more than £200,000 despite £122,000 going out of the door. Another has an estate that only gets bigger, and an inheritance tax problem that grows with it.

I've been to too many funerals this year for people who had no business dying yet. Get busy living.

If any of this weeks themes landed for you, feel free to get in touch via the link below.