The role itself has changed, and so have I. My first role was a tied adviser with the Co-operative Insurance Society, collecting life insurance premiums door-to-door, and now I run a Chartered Financial Planning practice. I was 23 when I started and am 50 next birthday. Turns out I’ve been a financial planner for more than half my life – scary!

Throughout that time, I’ve served well over a thousand families, but various cases stand out, and for different reasons. We want to write about some actual cases here so that you can get a sense of what we really do. Obviously the cases are anonymised for privacy.

John and Jane came to me having listened to my podcast, Meaningful Money. They had moved back to the UK after a couple of decades living and working overseas, but had done so for the most tragic of reasons: Jane was dying. She was 44 years old at the time.

Her cancer was well advanced, she had a few months to live at most, and what they wanted from me was reassurance that John would be OK after she had gone.

She wasn’t able to come to the office, so I duly arrived at their lovely home and set up my laptop and screen on their dining table. We had all the basic details of their current financial situation, so I had been able to build what we call the Base Plan ahead of time. This is where we enter all their current financial details, apply some default assumptions and see how things pan out.

Seated in front of them, I had to build a scenario where Jane was no longer around. This meant we had to know what the likely death benefits were from her old civil service pension, life insurance cover and lots more besides.

It was clear that being confronted with the practical implications of her dying was hard for them both to bear; it made things very real for them.

But what quickly became evident is that John was indeed going to be financially stable on his own. They had laid up enough provision so that she could die knowing that she didn’t have to worry about him. This was a huge relief to Jane and, for a time at least, tears were replaced by smiles.

There was one other bombshell though. John and Jane had been together for 25 years but were militantly anti-marriage as an institution. They just didn’t see the need for a piece of paper to show that they were committed to each other.

Which was fair enough until I reminded them that we live in a small-c conservative country that still favours marriage in the tax system. If Jane died while they were still unmarried, her estate would pay about £400,000 in inheritance tax…

***

A couple of weeks after the meeting, I got a call from John, out and about, calling from his mobile.

He told me that they were on their way to an appointment at the registry office where they were going to get married. He said that they were ‘bloody annoyed about having to do it’ but that it was worth it for the multiple six-figure tax saving.

He ended the call by thanking me again for giving them the peace of mind that Jane could die knowing that John would be OK. He said that she had really been at peace about that since our meeting.

I probably charged them a couple of thousand pounds maximum for the planning work - 0.5% of what they saved in inheritance tax due to my advice. The clients agreed that represented good value for money!

But I can’t imagine anyone putting a price on the peace of mind that a bespoke financial plan for their unique circumstances provided at an already impossibly difficult time.