the psychology of financial planning

Over our years as financial planners, we observed patterns of behaviour in clients; things that logically don’t make sense, but that keep happening. For example:

• Wealthy clients compounding their IHT problem with their inability to spend their money enjoying their life.
• Clients who always seem to spend a little more than they plan to – often prioritising helping out their adult children or other family over their own long-term financial health.
• People who hold hundreds of thousands of pounds in cash accounts – despite understanding that inflation will erode the buying power.

We’ve learned to coach people through these inclinations, and helped them to achieve their own success.

Whilst we’ve worked our way through the myriad of financial planning qualifications in the UK, it seems that there’s a piece of the puzzle missing. Understanding tax, pensions, protection is of course fundamental to our role, but these are just the framework and building blocks of our financial plans. None of the qualifications we’ve taken seem to address the driver of the success or failure of these plans – the clients – their minds, their thoughts, and why they do the things they do.

Our financial planning practice is based on robust, evidence-based processes and solutions, so that’s what we looked for… a robust, evidence-based approach to clients’ financial psychology.

And theory is interesting, but without the means to put our new found knowledge to good use, the impact is limited. So it made sense to look for a practical solution, a toolkit we could use to translate what we learned into techniques that we can use every day with our clients to help them achieve financial success.

We are delighted to be accredited as one of the UK’s first Psychology of Financial Planning Behaviour Specialists, and excited to be partnering with Dr Charles Chaffin and Dr Brad Klontz, to bring the Psychology of Financial Planning Specialist Programme to the UK.