Somewhere in your fifties, the question often changes from 'am I saving enough?' to 'could I actually stop?' Most people carry that question around for years without an answer. It sits there during the commute and resurfaces every birthday.

The answer is almost always knowable. You have pensions, savings, maybe a property or a business. You have a rough idea of the life you'd like. Retirement planning is the work of joining those two things together, and it's far more useful done ten years out rather than ten months out.

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Find out where you stand

We start by working out what your retirement might actually cost. Not a textbook figure, your figure: the travel you've been putting off, the golf membership, the kitchen that needs doing, the quiet months in between. Then we map everything you've built against it and show you, in plain numbers, whether you're on track.

Sometimes the answer is "yes, and you could finish earlier than you think." People rarely expect that one, and it's our favourite to deliver.

Making sense of your pensions

Most people arrive with a carrier bag of pension paperwork from four or five old jobs, various statements they don't read, and no idea what any of it costs them. We'll review what you've got: what it's worth, what you're paying and how it's invested. Where it makes sense, we'll consolidate old pots so there's less to keep track of. Where it doesn't, we'll tell you to leave things exactly where they are. Some older pensions might have valuable guarantees that are worth keeping.

Seeing your financial future

We use cashflow modelling, which is a plainer thing than it sounds: a year-by-year picture of your money across the rest of your life. It shows what happens if you retire at 60 instead of 65, spend more in the early years, help the kids with a house deposit, or live to 100. It can turn 'I hope it works out' into 'here's how it works.