Are your finances aligned with the life you actually want?

Looking at an investment account and wondering whether it’s enough is a bit like asking how long a piece of string is. Am I saving enough each month? Will I be able to afford retirement, could I take a career break, help my children onto the property ladder, or retire a few years earlier than planned? These are questions most of us ask ourselves at some point and yet they’re almost impossible to answer without the right framework, because the variables involved are enormous. 

Market performance, inflation, life changes, spending habits – the list of things we can’t predict or fully control is long enough to make you close the tab and decide you’ll think about it another day. And for most people, they do exactly that.

There’s a certain comfort in a vague sense of ‘probably fine’. You’re putting money away, your debts are slowly shrinking, you’re not spending recklessly. And with the endless unknowns mentioned, naturally it may lead you to believe, what more could you possibly do?

But financial goals, whatever yours happen to be, don’t take care of themselves. A long-term plan only works if it’s actually a plan something you’ve thought through, modelled out and checked against reality. Not once, years ago, but periodically as your life evolves.

That’s not saying there’s need to be obsessing over spreadsheets or predicting the unpredictable. It’s simply about having a clearer picture of where you are, what you’re working towards, and whether the two things are aligned. Because without that picture, you’re not really planning – you’re just hoping.

You may have come across the idea of a financial health check before and dismissed it. Perhaps you thought it wasn’t relevant yet because you’re only in your mid twenties. Or maybe retirement feels so far away that it doesn’t seem worth thinking about seriously. Or perhaps the concept sounded appealing but you weren’t quite sure what it actually involved.

Whatever your situation, a financial health check is for anyone with long-term goals and who wants to understand whether what they’re doing today is actually going to get them there.

What is a Guidance+ session?

At Moneyfarm, our version of a financial health check is called Guidance+, and if you’ve never heard of it, here’s the short version it’s a session designed to give you a genuinely clear and honest picture of your financial life. Where you are right now, what you’re working towards, and whether what you’re doing today is realistically going to get you there.

The beauty of it is that it’s built entirely around you. There’s no standard template or generic mould. Whether you’re thinking about retirement, planning to buy a property, wanting to help your kids financially, or simply curious about how your finances might look in fifteen years if you just keep doing what you’re doing, the session is shaped around your goals, your timeline and your circumstances.

We start by getting the full picture; income, outgoings, debts, savings, investments, pensions, property etc – because a plan is only as good as the information that goes into it, and the more complete the picture, the more useful the output.

Now, some of the more organised of you may have tried to build a model based on this yourselves – and honestly credit given where credit due! But I’m sure it’s limited, and here’s where it gets interesting. We use a tool called FE CashCalc, which takes things considerably further than a spreadsheet can. Rather than drawing a single straight line into the future and hoping for the best, CashCalc runs thousands of different historical market scenarios – boom years, crashes, recessions, slow recoveries – and builds a range of realistic projections based on all of them. It factors in inflation, tax, changing income and expenditure, investment growth, and more.

The result is a set of projections genuinely grounded in how markets and economies have actually behaved over time. So while still not a perfect science, it’s far better than the science of a simple linear growth assumption rate of 5%.

The real power the ‘what if’ scenarios

If there is one thing that makes a Guidance+ session genuinely eye-opening, it’s the scenario modelling. Once your baseline picture is built, we can start asking the really interesting questions.

To bring this to life, meet Tom and Sophie. Both 50, dual income, Sophie earning £55,000, Tom £42,000, with a mortgage, several pensions between them and a plan to retire at 67. They’re contributing to their pensions, their employer is topping them up, and they’re planning on living comfortably in retirement on £70,000 a year. On the surface, they’re doing the right things. Sound familiar?

When we built their base plan, assuming 2% inflation, a cautious investment benchmark (based on real historical data from 1990–2024) and 2% return on cash (remember, it’s a long-term forecast) this is what it looked like.

The money runs out at 82. For a couple planning to live to their late nineties, that’s a fifteen plus year gap – and that’s before factoring in any big life expenses, university costs for the kids, or the fact that their fees across all products sit at 0.7%, quietly compounding against them year after year.

This is the wake up call moment that a Guidance+ session is designed to create, because how can you fix a problem you don’t know exists?

So we started asking ‘what if.’

What if Tom consolidated his old frozen pension rather than leaving it to quietly underperform in the background? What if they moved some of their cash savings, which is barely keeping pace with inflation, into a Stocks and Shares ISA? What if Sophie and Tom nudged their pension contribution up by £200 monthly, to alleviate some of the cash they were accruing from not spending? And what if they consolidated their investments into a better performing portfolio and took a proper look at those fees?

Individually, none of these feel like dramatic decisions. But here is what they looked like together.

The money now lasts to age 89 – seven years further than before. Not from a financial overhaul, not from a sudden increase in salary, or a dramatic lifestyle changes, just from a handful of informed, intentional adjustments.

It’s worth noting that Tom and Sophie are a simplified example created purely to illustrate the kind of difference a Guidance+ session can make real plans are more nuanced and personal. But the principle holds.

That is the point. It’s about understanding which changes actually move the needle and which ones don’t. Without modelling it out, you’re essentially guessing. With it, you’re making informed decisions. And in the long run, eight years is a very long time to be guessing.

Why does it matter?

Most of us make financial decisions in isolation, without a clear sense of how they connect to the bigger picture. A daily coffee purchase feels trivial. An extra pension contribution feels abstract. Switching to a slightly better performing portfolio feels like admin. 

But when you can see the compounding effect of small, consistent changes played out over twenty or thirty years, as Tom and Sophie’s example shows, the seemingly insignificant starts to look very significant indeed.

The sooner you have a clear picture of where you stand, the sooner you can make informed decisions. And the sooner you make those decisions, the more time they have to work in your favour. Time is arguably the most powerful variable in any long-term financial plan, and it’s the one you can’t get back.

Markets will do what markets do, and life will throw things at you that no model can anticipate. But there is a meaningful difference between facing those unknowns with a well considered plan behind you and facing them with nothing more than a feeling that you’re probably okay.

A Guidance+ session won’t give you certainty – nothing can and it should be a big red flag if you’re told otherwise – but it will give you clarity. 

Interested in a session?

If any of this has resonated – whatever age you are and whether you have one pension or five, whether your goals are five years away or twenty five – a Guidance+ session is worth exploring. It typically takes around an hour, it’s built entirely around your situation, and it costs nothing to find out where you stand.

Please remember that when investing, your capital is at risk. The value of your portfolio with Moneyfarm can go down as well as up and you may get back less than you invest. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future performance. The views expressed here should not be taken as a recommendation, advice or forecast. If you are unsure investing is the right choice for you, please seek financial advice.