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The Webber Group: Expat Wealth Management Services and Solutions, Madrid (2026)

29/06/2026

Vacation time is here. Time for the pool and the sun. Lots of good food and seeing the family. However, even during the summer I don't go off grid completely. I have clients who aren't on vacation, who aren't at the beach, who still need access to their funds or want to invest before August when things here in Spain really shut down. Now this might seem contradictory since I always preach family first, but one of the things I try to cultivate with my clients is a sense of family. A quick call to see how they're doing outside of portfolio reviews. A happy birthday text or email. When you're working with someone over a long period of time they become like family and you don't disappear on family.

Emails will always get answered, just maybe a little slower than normal. If something urgent comes up I'm there. That's the job and I wouldn't have it any other way because I wouldn't want to work with someone who disappeared for weeks on end. The people I work with have trusted me with something important and that doesn't go on vacation even when I do.

July is the last useful window before Spain effectively shuts down for August and everything gets pushed to September. If you've been reading these posts for a while and thinking about getting your financial situation properly looked at, this is the moment. The people who make the most progress are the ones who use July to get things sorted rather than arriving in September realizing another summer passed without anything changing.

Here's what I'm offering. A thirty minute call, no cost, no obligation, no hard sell afterwards. We look at what you currently have, I tell you honestly whether it's working as well as it should be, and if there's something worth exploring we talk about what that looks like. If everything is already in good shape I'll tell you that and you can enjoy August knowing it's handled.

Send me a message this week or anytime in July. I treat my clients like family and that means I'll always get back to you.

Schedule here:

26/06/2026

Another week gone, another week closer to retirement, another gorgeous weekend here in Spain. As a bit of a wrap up for my loyal readers (most who seem to be from my own company), AI is genuinely useful. I use it every day. But there's a massive gap between using it as a tool and trusting it to make decisions that affect your family's financial future.

I talked about memory and history and why starting from scratch every time is a real problem when the decisions being made have years of context behind them. About accountability and what happens when something goes wrong and there's nobody to call. And about the two in the morning moments when the worst financial decisions get made and the last thing you need is something that will just answer without pushing back.

None of this is anti technology. Technology is great and can absolutely help us get better as an individual and as a species, it's just honest about what a tool is and what it isn't. You're not asking your hammer for advice on how to build a house or knife how to bake a cake. If you are, it maybe time to talk to a few other people about things.

On the economic side, the biggest thing affecting people here in Spain this week is the shift in ECB thinking. For most of this year the assumption was that rates were heading down. That assumption is changing and now the ECB is now looking at a rate hike, potentially as soon as next month, driven by energy prices that are staying stubbornly high because of the Iran situation and the Strait of Hormuz still being restricted. If you have a variable rate mortgage in Spain that's a direct hit to your monthly costs. If you're running a business with debt financing your operations it matters there too.

In UK news, the Bank of England held rates at 3.75% this week. If you're still holding UK pensions or ISAs that's worth paying attention to, especially given what's happening with the ISA tax changes we mentioned earlier this week.

The one piece of good news is that European economic sentiment turned positive for the first time since the Iran war started. People are beginning to see through the noise a little.

Don't melt in the weekend heat and remember to hydrate folks.

25/06/2026

One thing that AI has over me is availability. I try to be as available to people as I can but I'm not 24/7 like AI is. Now this is either incredibly useful or incredibly dangerous. For asking the problem cooking temperature for a steak or a new book recommendation it's amazing. For making potentially life altering financial decisions after a glass or two of wine and a curiosity search not so much.

The moments when people make the worst financial decisions are not the calm Tuesday afternoons when everything is fine and they have time to think clearly. They're the two in the morning moments. Something has been weighing on your mind and making it so you can't sleep; maybe your business didn't close the way it was supposed to or someone died and suddenly there's an estate to deal with. A marriage ended. A windfall arrived unexpectedly and everyone has an opinion about what to do with it. These are the moments when the stress is at it's highest, the emotional pressure is most intense, and the temptation to do something, anything, feels overwhelming. And yes, I've been there myself as well.

AI will "talk" with you at two in the morning without hesitation. It will take whatever emotional context you type into the box and give you a confident sounding answer based on incomplete information that you provided while you were stressed and not thinking straight. It has no ability to tell you that you're not in the right headspace to be making this decision right now. It has no interest in slowing you down. It will just answer regardless of consequences.

Now you can email me in the middle of the night asking these same questions but what will happen will be something completely different. You'll have gotten it off your chest so you can sleep but then in the morning things are coming from a different perspective. It helps to talk to an actual human being about things. I'm not a therapist or psychologist, but this also isn't my first time around the block. I've dealt with death. Dealt with unemployment. Dealt with divorce. I know these things first hand in a way AI doesn't. I also know your plan. Your ideas and hopes that you want for your future. You can't encapsulate that into a few sentences in a text box at two in the morning.

The best financial decisions are never made at two in the morning alone.

24/06/2026

It seems like the biggest AI push is to just have faith in our new machine overlords and what they tell us. But what ends up happening is that sometimes it's wrong. This is still in the baby stages of it all and it's fallible. Everyone is talking about how great things are and how easy it makes things but when something goes wrong it's only mentioned when it's a catastrophic failure. That's insane. Because it does go wrong. Not always in a blowing up the world type of way, but sometimes just quietly and expensively in ways that become obvious later.

When a regulated financial advisor makes a bad recommendation there is a process. A paper trail, a regulatory framework, a professional obligation, and a real person whose career and livelihood depend on getting it right for the people they work with. You can complain, escalate, and in serious cases seek compensation. The system isn't perfect but there is a system and there is someone accountable within it. Me, specifically.

When AI gives you financial advice that costs you money there is nobody to call. No complaint process, no regulatory body, no compensation scheme. The AI doesn't know you exist, doesn't care that you exist, and will give the next person who asks the same question the same answer without any awareness that it screwed up. You absorb the loss entirely on your own and now you're scrambling to figure out how bad the damage actually is.

This is what my industry is most focused on right now. It's not really about whether AI is smart enough. It's about the complete absence of accountability when things go t**s up. Regulations shift constantly and your personal situation changes in ways you're not running to a text box to report every time. ISAs in the UK are now being charged at 22% for example, a change that affects a lot of people here who still hold them and would have had no idea without someone flagging it directly to them.

I have skin in the game with every client I work with. I need to put food on the table and I can't do that without trust, without understanding people, without actually seeing their situations clearly.

AI doesn't eat. It doesn't have skin in anything.

23/06/2026

I get calls from clients when markets drop. Sometimes it's a panic, sometimes it's just checking in, sometimes it's asking about whatever stock has been all over the news that week. That call exists because there's a relationship behind it and because they know I'm going to give them a straight answer even if it's not the one they were hoping for.

That's the thing about AI that doesn't get said enough. It's conflict averse. It will tell you what you want to hear more often than what you need to hear. We've all seen how it handles pushback, someone argues with it and it folds, says sure you were right and I was wrong without much of a fight. That might be fine for some things. For financial decisions that affect your family and your retirement it's a serious problem. Sometimes the most valuable thing an advisor does is tell you clearly that what you're thinking of doing is a mistake.

The memory problem runs deeper than most people realize too. When you type something into AI you're giving it what's in your head at that exact moment. Nothing from last month, nothing from the conversation six months ago where you mentioned something in passing that turned out to matter a lot later. I work from notes, from accumulated context, from knowing how a client actually behaves when markets move versus how they describe their own risk tolerance. Those two things are often very different and that gap is where expensive mistakes live.

The combination of no memory and no willingness to push back is what makes relying on AI for financial decisions specifically so risky. It starts from zero every time and it tells you what sounds reasonable rather than what's actually right for your situation.

The relationship is what makes the difference. That part can't be typed into a box.

22/06/2026

One of the things that people have been going on a lot about recently is AI use. I'll admit, I use AI in my work. Not to make decisions for clients, not to replace the actual thinking, but as a tool. Research, understanding concepts faster, double checking things, speeding up processes that would otherwise take longer than they need to. Perhaps the most useful for me is when it helps suggest something that I've forgotten about from a conversation months prior. It's been useful for this and I'd be a hypocrite to say otherwise.

What it isn't is an advisor. And right now there are a lot of people using it as one, which is where things start going sideways.

The presentations, classes, and seminars happening in my industry at the moment are pretty pointed about this and it's dangers. AI has no regulatory oversight in financial advice. It doesn't know your actual situation, your family, what keeps you up at night, what you're really trying to build. It knows what you type into a box. It can give you a confident sounding answer based on general information that has nothing to do with your specific tax situation, your residency, your risk tolerance, or the fact that you have a seven year old whose university you're quietly trying to fund in the background.

The danger isn't that AI gives you wrong information, though it does that too sometimes. The danger is that it gives you right information that's wrong for you specifically, and it does it confidently enough that you act on it. Everything needs to be double checked, fee calculations, currency conversions, and especially names of things. A simple copy paste is the most dangerous because if you haven't read it and discussed it with someone there can be glaring, obvious errors that you are basing life changing decisions on.

I use it because it makes me better at my job. The same way a good chef's knife makes everything more efficient and smoother without replacing what they actually do. The tool is useful. Replacing the judgment with the tool is where people are getting hurt.

19/06/2026

Time for our weekly summary for the folks who only pop over once in a while. This week I tired something a little different than usual. Less spreadsheets, market analysis, or bashing people over the head why they should invest. More about why any of this actually matters. Building something for my son, making sure things are set up so they pass to him smoothly, what I'm teaching him just by how I handle money day to day, and why putting it off through summer ends up costing more than just dealing with it now.

On the market side, a lot of the clients I've been reviewing portfolios and plans with this week have been pretty excited about what's happening with the IBEX. They're not wrong to be. The index is sitting near all time highs right now, up there with the rest of Europe which has also been hitting record territory. It's a good moment and it's nice to see people feeling good about their portfolios for once instead of nervous.

That said, a strong run like this is exactly the moment to make sure things are actually structured properly rather than just riding the wave and hoping it continues. Gains feel great. What matters more is whether they're protected, whether they're diversified, and whether the plan behind them still makes sense for where you're trying to go.

If this week got you thinking about what you're actually building toward, for your family, for your kid, for whatever it is that matters to you, that's the conversation worth having. Have a good weekend and enjoy the summer while it's here.

18/06/2026

Summer is here and it's my favorite time of year. One of my favorite things to do is sit out on the patio as the day cools off, read a bit, put on some music, and let the dinner or the dishes or the million other things at home wait a little longer than they should. Time to actually enjoy life instead of constantly being on top of every little thing.

Except here's what happens. All that stuff I put off doesn't disappear. It just piles up until I'm spending a whole Saturday catching up on everything at once instead of spreading it out. I know it's the easy way out in the moment and I do it anyway because that's just how it goes sometimes.

Investments, retirement, pensions, getting all of that actually sorted, work the exact same way. It's easy to put off. Everyone does it, me included sometimes. But wouldn't it just be easier to find someone to handle it so you're not the one carrying it around in the back of your mind?

It's the same logic as having someone come clean once a week instead of losing your Saturday to it. Going out to eat instead of cooking when you're exhausted. Hiring a landscaper instead of spending your whole weekend trying to make the yard look decent. You pay for it, sure, but what you get back is your actual time and the ability to enjoy it without that nagging feeling that something's not getting done.

Financial planning works the same way. A little bit at a time, handled properly, makes everything down the line so much easier. Put it off long enough and it all comes due at once, and that's a much bigger headache than it ever needed to be.

Let me be the one doing the dishes on this one. Go enjoy your patio.

17/06/2026

Generational wealth gets thrown around a lot and most people hear it and think it's just for the ultra rich. Most of us are just trying to make sure our own retirement is covered, and that's already a real win on its own.

But here's how I actually think about it for my own situation. My goal is to save to a point where I can withdraw four or five percent a year without touching the principal, because market growth covers that withdrawal and the money just keeps doing its thing. The idea is that by the time my son is thinking about his own retirement, he's got that as a head start instead of starting completely from zero. Not a fortune handed to him, just a kickstart so he's not building from nothing the way a lot of us had to.

The tricky part is the other half of this, actually teaching him about money along the way. He's seven. Right now all he cares about is futbol cards and Legos, which honestly isn't that far off from me at forty two either. But the discipline part is what actually matters. Being intentional about saving now, even in small ways, is what builds toward something later.

This is a big part of what I work on with people. Finding where the money's actually going, where there's room to save, getting something invested even if it's small to start. The saying is that the best time to invest was ten years ago. The second best time is today. What you're invested in shifts too, more growth focused when you're younger, more conservative as retirement gets closer.

Family comes first, always. But being able to leave something behind instead of needing your kids to take care of you later is a pretty good feeling, and it starts with the decisions you're making right now.

16/06/2026

After Covid a lot of things got thrown into chaos that nobody really planned for. That happened to my family too. Watching my mother have to deal with an unexpected inheritance and everything that came with it wasn't exactly fun for anyone involved. We all like to think something like that won't happen again but the last few years have shown plenty of things happening that nobody saw coming.

For me personally the inheritance situation is pretty simple. I'm a single dad with one son. Not complicated. My parents on the other hand, between them there's five kids and a bunch of grandkids. That's a different level of complexity entirely.

When I think about setting things up so my son is taken care of, it's not just about writing a basic will and forgetting about it. It's making sure everything can move through probate without getting stuck, that it's taxed fairly, and that it actually reaches them quickly when the time comes instead of sitting tied up in paperwork for months. Hopefully that's a long way off, but working with a lot of people who are a bit older than me, it's something I think about, for them and also for myself.

The good part is that with the people I work with, this isn't just a conversation with one person. It's with their wife, their kids, sometimes their grandkids if they're old enough to be part of it. Everyone knows who I am and knows they can call me if something happens suddenly. That's intentional. I'm not just managing one person's money, I'm there for the whole family if things change quickly and somebody needs help figuring out what to do next.

Having seen this first hand, that's the part of this job that actually matters most to me.

The Webber Group: Expat Wealth Management Services and Solutions

29/06/2026

26/06/2026

25/06/2026

24/06/2026

23/06/2026

22/06/2026

19/06/2026

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