“Would we be in this same place had we not exercised financial planning? No, we would not.”

I'm not particularly financially literate. My wife is more financially literate than me, but we still didn't feel in control of our lives in terms of how we earn, how we spend money, and how we approach retirement.

Once a year, we sit down with Fortitude Financial Planning. We work out what we’re going to spend, we anticipate how much money we might spend as we move towards retirement, and we work out what our relative income is, both from our investments and our salaries. 

We’re then able to use that data to make some value judgments on how to manage our lives. It means we can determine when we want to do something big, like buy something, or even bigger – potentially retire. Fortitude Financial Planning has allowed us to predict likely spending cycles for 10, 20, or even 30 years. So, we know, within a reasonable degree, what we're going to be spending. We've been able to retire – I retired in November 2017; we've been able to downsize – we sold our big house. We've realised the capital gain from that, and we're going to be spending some of that on a smaller house, and we exchange contracts on that next week. 

We're in a brilliant place really. Would we be in this same place if we had not exercised financial planning? No, we would not. We’d still be flapping around with ISAs and investments that we didn't properly understand because we hadn't worked out the impact of those on how we wanted to live our lives going forward. 

I've been lucky enough to earn some big money in my life as an IT Sales Director. Financial planning has allowed us both to organise that so that we can enjoy the benefit of it as we move towards big decisions like retirement.