It is, are you? What normal looks like.

by Doug Brodie

In this blog:

You - a perspective
Don’t look Ethel! (It was too late)

You - a perspective

Within the last month, the people who contacted us for the first time for advice have ranged from someone in London with £9m in investable assets, covering a Luxembourg trading account to a SIPP to a discretionary manager portfolio and a personal brokerage sum, and a very nice lady from the sticks who works for a local authority and has £200,000 in her accumulated work pensions.

The average age of everyone who speaks to us is 62, and that ranges from 44 up to 91. The majority of investors have between £300k and £5m, a third still have a mortgage of some type, and most have adult children between 20 and 38, though around 15% have no children at all.

Every single person has come to us for advice and guidance on how to generate reliable income from their money. Every person starts with loading up information into our planning software, and most change their initial years income plans once they see everything laid out.

The interesting thing is that at retirement everyone asks about being able to splurge on big holidays for the first few years ….. and then they never do. The software tools allow us to model the maximum annual spending that you can have each year through retirement, based on the input expenses, assets and assumptions, and that appears to be not so much a spending target, more of a double check of where the spending boundary lies. There’s a sense of security of knowing where annual expenditure could go to if needed. What if ….

Lastly, people like you have not spent the last forty years watching the markets throughout the day, and you are unlikely to have an accurate reference point for what to expect – “managing expectations” is probably the best two-word description for what we do. To deal with this we can run calculations in the tool that shows us - you – what rate of return, per year, is needed on your money to ensure your money never runs out. This is what it looks like:

Don’t look Ethel!! (it was too late…)

There was the old school yard banter about ‘if you could see the book of your life would you want to read it’ – if it was known when you are going to die, would you want to know?

I came across this calendar recently, and I can’t imagine a worse item to have in your house. (Any other comment is redundant!)

Visualize your life in weeks & unlock your true potential

Your life is made up of 4160 weeks, and this tool will help you make the most of them.

Fill in a new square with each passing week, and you'll quickly experience improved focus, a heightened perspective on life, and a rush of motivation to take consistent action.

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Latin for 'Remember your death', Memento Mori is a powerful concept that's been used for centuries to help people focus on what truly matters.

The calendar was designed as an interactive tool to help you harness the concept by visualizing your life week by week.