Valerie: Hi, my name is Valerie, this is Martin, my husband. We’ve probably known Jonathan over 20 years now, I probably retired about seven years ago, and there’s that hurdle that you need to get over. From saving all your life, thinking about the future, whether you’re going to have enough money, always putting money away every year, looking at your finances, seeing them build up. And then it’s a completely different mindset, really. You flip it on its head: there’s your pot, there’s not much coming in now, so where do we go from here? Can we afford this? Do we have to scale things down? He’s really made that transition very smooth for us and sort of helped us through.

Martin: I went through a bit of a funny spell after a nice holiday. We were away, I came back, and I was in a funny place. A sort of anxiety – what do I do? Do I want to do anything? Should I do anything? Have I got enough money to retire now? By sitting down there with Jonathan and going through his planning procedures and telling him what we want to do, we then had his assurances that we were going to be fine doing what we wanted to with our investments. It really just takes all the stress out of worrying about how you’re going to be able to afford your retirements. One of the first things Jonathan did when I retired was to send me a list of the ‘top 10 things that Martin needs to do now he’s retired’! If  I’d have looked at that before, I would have said, ‘I’m not going to spend that sort of money on those sorts of things’. But we’re now assured that we can do that.

Valerie: Mostly playing golf courses around the world! And you’re ticking them off the list, so it’s going quite well. We’ve managed to probably have three or four now, which we I don’t think we’d have had the confidence to spend that amount of money on a holiday and think ‘things are still gonna be okay’. Yeah, that seems like a huge outlay just to go and splash out on a holiday, but then you’ve just got to do it. Because your health is important, but who knows what’s around the corner? So while we’ve still got energy and the enthusiasm to travel around the world, we just could rely on Jonathan’s advice and say ‘right, let’s go ahead and book that holiday.’ He’s a bit of a counsellor, I would say.

Martin: He is. Working with Jonathan, he has sort of been my counsellor into retirement, and now I’m enjoying my retirement as well to the full. It’s also interesting that whenever we go and have a meeting with Jonathan, we always come away feeling that we should go and celebrate. He just has this has this way of making us feel so relaxed, like everything is okay.

Valerie: I think we want our friends and family to be able to have that same peace of mind. So it’s like a gift, isn’t it really. You can talk about all sorts of things that you know about and just recommend them, but it is a gift that you can give to someone else – that peace of mind, so that they can enjoy the same reassurance that we have.