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Hoe Bridge Wealth, Steward House, Woking (2026)

03/06/2026

The power of listening - Do you know your audience?

Not long ago I was listening to a Keynote speaker give an address on the topic of ‘listening better’. This was an exclusive gathering in London of perhaps 50 leading financial planners, all very much engaged in a full day of learning around how we could each better support, serve and meet the needs of our clients.

The slides were colourful and had some interesting thoughts. The speaker had an impressive background as a negotiator, and recounted for us literally life-or-death situations where listening carefully had made all the difference to the outcome.
And yet, in his interactions with the quite intimate audience, for me at least, something felt off. Perhaps he was trying to be deliberately different. Perhaps he wanted to provoke more than a clichéd response. But after asking for audience for suggestions on what is key to good listening, the speaker almost dismissively brushed aside the suggestions he got, as outdated or not relevant. Not surprisingly, fewer hands went up. And it seemed perverse that a speech on “Listening Well” was being delivered by someone who apparently didn’t value what anyone else had to say!

I don’t know if it was my previous training as a teacher and educator, or my own tendency to resist authoritarian approaches, but I wasn’t enjoying the tone. However, there were others in the audience who clearly were stimulated by this contrarian viewpoint – encapsulated in the idea that you have to find someone’s core motive or goal – and that should be the laser-focus of good listening. There may be a kernel of truth there, so I did my best to listen with an open mind.

From my perspective, the session got worse. The speaker asked for a show of hands regarding situations where we needed to close a sale even if we didn’t really have much affinity for, or maybe even didn’t trust the other person. And I’m sure this is a routine challenge for a police officer dealing with a person who is no longer behaving rationally – he gave the example of where someone is holding their own family hostage and threatening violence.

But he couldn’t believe that almost no-one in the audience seemed to agree that sometimes you just have to spend several hours listening carefully to someone you really don’t like or trust. Maybe the speaker was used to addressing large gatherings of product salespeople: where listening skills are a means to “win” a negotiation or close a deal and earn the commission.

Instead, in this room we were almost all planners for whom one of the most important parts of our work is building a substantial long-term relationship with anyone we’re looking to help. We certainly do have some difficult, delicate conversations, and sometimes a person we work with is under substantial pressure and looking to release some of that onto us. But if we can’t build on trust and openness, or it’s clear that we’re only being given partial information, many of us have learned to walk away rather than blindly or ignorantly trying to support someone with potentially crucial life-altering decisions.

While there were some thought-provoking nuggets to take away from the session, I believe that it lost some of its power because the speaker assumed several things about his audience. He may have brought with him a mindset from the hierarchical command structure of a police team. Or he may not have taken the time to fully understand who we in the audience were and how we work. Despite having some excellent visual materials, the tone in which the speaker delivered his words on what makes good listening, actually seemed to undermine the message.

No matter who you are, we’re all in situations where you want to make your meaning clear and relevant to others. So, here are a few key ideas that the speech did help me (perhaps accidentally) to consider around how to help your message land well with your audience:
• Do your research on your audience: as much as you can, try to get information before-hand that will help you understand their approach, perspectives, or needs.
• Even after background research has been done, when you’re with your audience, first take the time to calibrate your sense of not only who they are, but also their mood there and then, and let this help you shape your approach to the message and delivery. In the words of Stephen R Covey, “Understand first, then be understood”.
• Listen early to what is most important to them – because often this is the key to unlocking the conversation for everyone.
• Match your tone with their emotional state – this is one of the great challenges of management of teams, and also of doing a good job supporting financial planning clients. It requires figuring out what their frame of mind is, and whether they most need: reassurance, freedom to act, a nudge, or a kick in the rear! 😄
• Listen to the voice in your head. It’s surprising how much your sub-conscious will pick up on long before you can understand it rationally. If you feel you’re losing the connection with your audience, for whatever reason, figure out how you may be able to change the trajectory of the conversation. This can take some practice, and unfortunately some of it is also just luck and timing. Complete wipe-outs do happen - whether in presentations or conversations (just ask any comedian about trying new material!). If you’re lucky, the audience will be understanding, and you can look to revisit the subject at another time.

In Financial Planning good communication and understanding the needs of each individual is important, because working well to support someone often spans a range of emotional, practical, and technical needs.

Would you like to have a meaningful conversation about your money and its place in your life, including how it will support your future plans?

Get in touch for a free initial chat to see how I may be able to help you.

None of the above is financial or investment advice and you should speak to me or someone else professionally qualified to give you advice specifically tailored to your circumstances.

06/05/2026

Will the top companies stay on top?
What if nothing lasts forever, but the past is the only thing we know?

The chances are incredibly slender that all of today’s top companies will still be in the same place 10 years from now. As the graphic from Dimensional Fund Advisors shows, since 1980, there have been significant rotations of which businesses are among the top 10 largest in America, just as an example.

No-one can know the future, so we do have to base our decisions on what we’ve seen happen in the past. And when it comes to investing, that past tells us that no matter how dominant the Magnificent 7 may seem today, the thoughtful investor should diversify their holdings, in order to benefit from the future growth of smaller, less well-known businesses, and the very likely decline or disruption of at least some of the businesses that are among today’s largest.
That is why our investment philosophy at Hoe Bridge Wealth embraces diversification as one of the pillars of good investing.

The likelihood of change among the very largest and currently often the most expensive to buy companies (in terms of share price compared with company earnings), is also another reason why we believe that there are ways for long-term investors to add value to index-tracker investing (see our article here on this for more: https://hoebridgewealth.co.uk/investment-are-there-ways-to-add-value-to-index-tracker-investing/)

What is your investment strategy and how do you stick to it?

Get in touch for a free initial call if you’d like to have a short chat about your investment strategy:
https://calendly.com/duncan-bw-hoebridgewealth/30min

NOTE: Investments can go down as well as up in value, and you may get back less than your original investment. None of the above is financial or investment advice and you should speak to me or someone else professionally qualified to give you advice specifically tailored to your circumstances.

29/04/2026

FacingToo Many Decisions At Once?!

When Louis and Zarah* (not their real names) first came to me, they were trying to deal with too many inter-related decisions at once.

On the face of it, Louis had a simple question: should he take an annuity income being offered to him now, or potentially more income at a later age?

But underneath this, both Louis and Zarah were confronting a number of changes in their lives:
- They had both been made redundant within the past 12 months from highly-paid corporate roles, and had become self-employed
- Each of them held significant mortgage borrowings against not only their shared main residence but also various rental properties
- Their spending had not adjusted to their new statuses of being self-employed and starting fledgling businesses
- Their pensions and ISA’s were self-invested in a hodge-podge of different funds that took a much higher level of investment risk than most clients are comfortable with when markets fall (as they are prone to do from time to time).

To his credit, and one of the things that made him a pleasure to work with, Louis himself acknowledged that a lot of what he’d done up to the point of our meeting was driven by Google searches, chatting with friends, and other less-than-reliable sources. When we first met, he said, “I know just enough to be dangerous!” 😆

We started our work together with some in-depth conversations around their priorities in life, as well as their future outlook toward retirement – ideally they both saw this as being several years in the future. In addition there was some technical analysis of the various annuity income options offered, the relative valuations and costs of borrowing for their different properties compared with the compounded total returns generated by them, a review of their household and individual spending and identification of the major drivers of their monthly costs, and some discussion of the need for an underpinning investment philosophy when making decisions about investment risk and tax wrappers, as well as ensuring effective alignment with the likely time frames for the use of the various investments.

Working together through these various questions in a structured way helped them both to realise what changes they wanted to make and why. As an added bonus, Zarah realised that I could help her to be more strategic about how she rewards herself from her new limited company as this grows in success.

The key to solving a problem with too many questions lies in a few steps that may seem obvious with hindsight:
- Breaking the situation down into its component parts and attacking each one individually (without losing sight of the big picture)
- Exploring your ‘Why’ for each choice available to ensure a long-term fit with your needs (see our article on this: https://hoebridgewealth.co.uk/thinking-start-with-why/ )
- Prioritising the order in which to take actions and setting out a roadmap to the future

While there are some technical matters than can be potentially confusing (especially regarding pensions and investment details), Financial Planning often isn’t alchemy: in much the same way that with the right tools and enough mental separation, you can guide yourself through the realisations that a therapist might help you to reach, it is possible to find personal finance solutions just by looking in the mirror.

But an outside perspective – to challenge your underlying assumptions and potentially raise questions you may not have even known to ask – can really help you reach a plan that you have full confidence to carry forward into the future.

Who helps you think through your personal financial strategy?

Get in touch if you would appreciate a properly thought out conversation that could help you to act with clarity on your personal finances going forward.

NOTE: The value of your investment can go down as well as up. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results. None of the above is financial or investment advice and you should speak to me or someone else professionally qualified to give you advice specifically tailored to your circumstances.

26/04/2026

Retirement is a psychological transition that can easily be underestimated when planning for your future.

This is the next in the series of video excerpts from my recent webinar: Are you Retirement Ready?

Here we consider some of the psychological adjustment and 'mental work' that go into making a success of retirement.

Please get in touch if you would like access to the full webinar.

You can also download my free guide to retirement here:
https://lnkd.in/enEkg33t

15/04/2026

Helping Mum: how I helped a friend's mother after she lost her husband.

David* and I have known each other for years (all names in this story are fictional to protect identities). But because we’re friends, he’s never wanted to muddy the waters by working with me and possibly bringing money into our friendship. I have other clients who are good friends and they like knowing that I’ll always look out for their best interests and tell it to them straight. But I respected this decision on David’s part, because I knew some of his family history and why his approach was more about him than about me.

David’s father John* died quite suddenly, leaving his mother Pat* on her own. Pat is a kind, quick-witted and active lady – although knee and hip replacements have taken their toll on her golfing, and she’s now more likely to be playing bridge with her friends.

The timing of John’s death – it happened very quickly and came as a shock – meant that Pat was caught quite unprepared. One particular issue was that John had been the one who organised and managed all of the household finances, including pensions and other investments. True to the stereotype, John had worked for years with an ‘old boy’ from one of the big investment houses who he’d known from his days in the city. Pat had previously not felt as confident as John about financial matters, nor wanted to intrude, trusting that John would organise things.

David asked me if I could come to meet Pat and have a chat with her. It was lovely to see her again after many years - we’d only met briefly a few times when David and I were at university. But we enjoyed speaking together, sharing a common bond of fondness for David and all his quirks. It was immediately clear that Pat had both emotional and practical needs.

Emotionally, Pat needed to:
- Build up confidence in her financial knowledge and decision-making
- Have the support of someone she felt comfortable to talk with about the many different options available and actions that might be taken
- Feel the reassurance of having a plan to ensure that she would be independent and in control of her own affairs

Practically, Pat needed to:
- Work with other executors to finalise probate after John’s death
- Update her own Will and, if necessary, her own Powers of Attorney in case of loss of legal capacity
- Get to grips with her new situation in terms of income and expenses
- Get a clear overview of the revised financial landscape now that she was the sole owner of all properties, investments and other assets
- Make informed decisions about how to manage her income and expenditure as well as her assets going forward.

Pat decided that she felt more comfortable with me than she had in the meeting with John’s ‘old boy’ from the big firm. It did also feel a bit late that he suddenly wanted to see her now, after practically ignoring her for twenty years. He was pretty close to retirement age himself, and Pat didn’t fancy outlasting her supposed adviser.

So we spent several weeks and a series of meetings pulling together the different practical and emotional issues that we wanted to resolve.
During this process I was able to help Pat with several issues:
- John had been overpaying for expensive but not particularly well-performing investments, with very limited financial planning beyond mere investment advice being given, despite the relatively high fees.
- John had his own ISA full of an eclectic mix of different investments – likely picked over years of tinkering with tips from the daily newspapers, which John had enjoyed as a sort of hobby. But from an outside perspective it was a portfolio that didn’t make any strategic sense. Emotionally here it was important for Pat to feel she could move on, rather than having to keep all the investments as John had them, which would the equivalent of leaving all of his clothes in the wardrobe to gather dust.
- Pat felt very reassured when I was able to build her a cashflow plan showing her forecast expenditure for the rest of her life, taking into account incomes being received including spouse pensions from John’s Defined Benefit Scheme as well as the State Pension, and that she would be self-sufficient.
- We also then had to consider how to handle a likely Inheritance Tax bill in the future – 40% tax on everything above £1 million – based on the combined value of Pat’s home, the various investments, and from April 2027, the combined value of her and John’s defined contribution pension pots.

Pat and I are continuing to work on things together – it is an ongoing process. Estate planning decisions have involved discussions with David and his sister, so these things take time. But we’re making good progress, and Pat is enjoying her life, even though it’s clear that she still misses John very much after the many decades of their marriage.

Do you know someone who could use support with their personal finances? Or with intergenerational planning and being strategic about potential inheritance tax?

Get in touch if you would like to have a chat or would like to set up a no-obligation conversation with me for someone you care about.

NOTE: The value of your investment can go down as well as up. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results. None of the above is financial or investment advice and you should speak to me or someone else professionally qualified to give you advice specifically tailored to your circumstances.

08/04/2026

Where in the world should my investments go – what about according to GDP?
One of the most difficult potential questions for any investor is how to spread their investments across the different countries and regions of the globe.

Some active fund managers stake their reputations on this question – always seeking to shift capital to the parts of the world that are rising, and leaving behind those that are falling. This is another form of attempting to ‘time’ markets, and we’ve written elsewhere about how the fortunes of different regions from an investor perspective is frequently a ‘random walk’ (https://hoebridgewealth.co.uk/investment-can-you-predict-where-in-the-world-your-money-will-be-best-invested/).

However, to have a consistent approach to investing, some guiding principle does need to be used in making geographic investment choices. One suggestion would be to align weightings of investments to the GDP value of each country. After all, GDP or Gross Domestic Product, measures the output of each country and should tell us a lot about the economic power of a country. But the investable opportunities in a country are not always aligned with that country’s GDP. Perhaps the most famous example of this is China, which in April 2025 represented 18.7% of global GDP, but only 3.1% of the capital market investment value (see the graphic from Dimensional Fund Advisers). A large part of this is accounted for by the fact that foreign investors are severely restricted in how much they can own of listed Chinese companies, and it is also quite likely that a substantial proportion of Chinese industry is partly government-owned and therefore cannot very easily be invested in on public markets.

Those who follow data closely will also tell us that whereas market capitalisation is updated every single day, as share prices rise and fall. GDP data by contrast, often has a significant time-lag between actual events and the publication of confirmed figures. Italy is another country that would skew a GDP weighting – it is the eight-largest country by GDP, but Italian stocks account for only 26 of the 2,557 large companies in the MSCI ACWI index. This is in part because Italy’s economy is anchored by a plethora of smaller and private companies which cannot easily be invested in.

Our Hoe Bridge Wealth investment philosophy advocates using market-capitalisation weighting as the starting point for geographic investment decisions. This can help to keep down unnecessary trading costs as country weights adjust naturally with stock market movements. And it takes out some guesswork that otherwise can lead to anomalous performance.

What is your investment strategy and how do you stick to it?

Get in touch for a free initial call if you’d like to have a chat about your investment strategy:
https://calendly.com/duncan-bw-hoebridgewealth/30min

NOTE: Investments can go down as well as up in value, and you may get back less than your original investment. None of the above is financial or investment advice and you should speak to me or someone else professionally qualified to give you advice specifically tailored to your circumstances.

02/04/2026

Have I Got Enough To Retire?

The next in the series of videos from the recent webinar: Are you Retirement Ready?

Here we look at figuring out what 'enough' is when it comes to planning for your retirement.

Please get in touch if you would like access to the full webinar.

You can also download my free guide to retirement here:
https://lnkd.in/enEkg33t

25/03/2026

What haven't you thought of? Unexpected questions or events for business owners and decision-makers that financial planning should help you with.

Nassim Taleb coined the phrase ‘Black Swans’ to describe completely unexpected or even unpredicted events that prove to have huge impact on us.

The truth however, is that many of the events that take a business owner or high-powered decision-maker by surprise, are in fact highly probable, and predictable, we just didn’t take the time or get the right support to help us anticipate them.
Here are a few examples:
• Business partners’ relationship becomes strained by external forces such as their spouses or families
• An injury or accident prevents an owner or key team member from being able to work effectively for a disruptive period of time
• Sickness changes the home situation for someone vital to your team (e.g. a spouse becomes critically ill) – placing tremendous strain on their work or ability to focus on work
• Burn-out or long-term fatigue dampens your enthusiasm for the business and you want to explore an exit or capital-extraction from the business
• The business environment or business model changes and it is time to fundamentally pivot or even start again from scratch
• One of the owners of the business dies, leaving the remaining owners scrambling to figure out how their share can be bought from the estate

Who is helping you to answer questions about the unexpected but not unpredictable?

All of these are issues that a good financial planner should help you to consider and decide how best to hedge against or plan for.

Download our free guide to Personal Finance for Business Owners (and lots of it is very useful for critical decision-makers in any business too): https://hoe-bridge-wealth.kit.com/bizownerguidesignup

Get in touch for a free initial call if you’d like to have a short chat about your preparedness for your business or life events:
https://calendly.com/duncan-bw-hoebridgewealth/30min

NOTE: Investments can go down as well as up in value, and you may get back less than your original investment. None of the above is financial or investment advice and you should speak to me or someone else professionally qualified to give you advice specifically tailored to your circumstances.

20/03/2026

Are you retirement ready? Ten tips for planning your retirement 🙂

20/03/2026

A first in our series of videos from our recent webinar: Are you Retirement Ready?

Here we look in brief overview at 10 tips for planning your retirement.

Please get in touch if you would like access to the full webinar.

You can also download my free guide to retirement here:
https://hoe-bridge-wealth.kit.com/guide-retirementplanning

Hoe Bridge Wealth

03/06/2026

06/05/2026

29/04/2026

26/04/2026

15/04/2026

08/04/2026

02/04/2026

25/03/2026

20/03/2026

20/03/2026

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