Don and Peggy’s story

Between Peggy and I, we have seven children and eight grandchildren.

When Peggy and I got together in 2006, we wanted someone to start looking after our affairs and advise us on our wills and future savings plans and that kind of thing. Getting together was a big life change, so we needed someone who knew what they were talking about when it came to helping us resolve our financial affairs.

At that time, I was in charge of Health and Safety for a chemicals site. Shortly after, I was headhunted and became the Global Head of Health and Safety at Johnson Matthey, a FTSE 100 company. I covered 30 countries.

When we first went to see Neil, I was conscious about getting my affairs in order, but also, retirement felt like it was coming up quickly over the horizon, so it was something we needed to give some attention to.

When you embark on a process like this, it can lead to some uncomfortable truths being uncovered. Neil correctly identified that we needed to make various changes in how we managed our financial affairs. When we look back on how our savings were progressing, we can see how useful those recommendations were. We’ve really benefited as a result of those changes. Neil produced a cashflow analysis for every year of our life up to age 100. We’d never looked at it that way. We had a sum of money in the bank and as long as that was ok; we didn’t look much further. But doing that cashflow modelling exercise means we feel much more secure now and able to weather any financial storms that might come our way.

The work with Neil got me to where I thought I could retire. My career was fulfilling, but I had a few health problems, so I wanted to retire early.

For the first year, I helped look after the grandchildren, messed around with my music, took my grandkids to school. But I’ve since started a consultancy company, providing Health and Safety consultancy to blue-chip clients. I’ve built it up from word of mouth and I’m retained by a couple of big companies. I have the best of both worlds really… I’m a retired guy, but I have occasional breaks from retirement to go off and earn some money. It’s on my terms; if I want the day off for a saxophone lesson, I can do so!

Neil is always at the end of the phone. If I have anything I want to ask him, I just call him up and we have a chat. I usually explain what I want to talk about, we have a meeting and talk things through over a coffee. We pay Neil a monthly retainer and we get very good value from that. In fact, we get excellent value for money – if you look at our savings; we make more than that retainer back.

He occasionally tells us things we don’t want to hear. Like, you can’t retire when you’re 62 as it’ll be bad for your financials, but you can retire when you’re 63. We’re friends, but you know he’s not shy about telling you unpalatable things and that’s what you need.

Our grandchildren all live in Middlesbrough and we used to live a bit of a trek away, so we decided we were going to up sticks and move closer to them. We couldn’t find a house, but we found a plot of land we liked. No services, nothing, just a green field! So, we bought it and built a house on it! Neil has helped us to make sure that it didn’t negatively impact our finances too much. We start our pensions next year and the plan is that it will all be paid off by then.

We continue to work together with Neil because retirement isn’t the end of the story. We hope and expect that our relationship will continue into the future.

Using Neil and his team means we don’t need to worry about external threats to our finances, like recessions – everything is taken care of for us. We understand our risk profile very well – it’s one of the things Neil is very thorough on. We know he’s doing the best job he possibly can to protect our financial future.