Plan your future with clarity and retire on your terms.


Andrew had spent his career in IT sales, moving between four companies over thirty years and picking up a tangle of restricted stock units, share schemes and five separate workplace pension pots along the way. Catherine had spent the same years teaching, with a job she loved and a quiet, persistent worry that they would never have enough. Work fatigue had been creeping up on Andrew for a while, and when he was made redundant — with sixty just around the corner — the prospect of finding a new role felt overwhelming. They were also nursing scars from an earlier bad experience: a high-risk investment a decade before had cost them a meaningful sum and left them suspicious of the whole industry. Between investment jargon, ever-shifting pension rules and the looming question of inheritance tax on a home and savings that had quietly grown over twenty years, they had been ignoring the most important part of their planning.

From the very first meeting we made sure Andrew and Catherine were both in the room. Understanding what each of them worried about, and what they really wanted, mattered far more than any spreadsheet — and shaped everything that followed. We brought every pension, every share scheme, the redundancy package and the family home onto a single page, then shone a light into scenarios that had felt dark and unknowable. When could Andrew really stop work? What would happen if he never went back? How should they unwind the shares across tax years? How big was the inheritance tax bill becoming, and could we sensibly shrink it? Once the picture was clear, the rest followed naturally — we structured the share sale across multiple tax years, used the redundancy payment to maximise pension carry-forward, consolidated the five pots onto a single low-cost platform, and started a lifetime gifting strategy that eroded the IHT problem without compromising their own security.