What a financial plan actually contains

People arrive expecting a folder of charts. What they leave with is closer to a short document that answers four questions: what you have, what you want the money to do, what could go wrong, and what to do first.

The first part is a list. Every account, pension, policy and property, with what it costs to hold and what it is invested in. Most clients have not seen all of it on one page before, and a few of them change their mind about something before we get to any advice.

The second part is the cash-flow model. We put your income, spending, tax and likely retirement date into a model that runs to age 100, then show what happens if you retire earlier, work part time, help a child with a deposit, or lose a few years to a bad market.

The third part is protection: what happens to the plan if one income stops. The fourth is the list of actions, in order, with who does each one and by when. That list is usually shorter than people expect, and the first item is rarely about investments.

We write the plan in the same language we use in the meeting. If a sentence needs a glossary, it gets rewritten.