My day starts off fairly quietly with the alarm going off at a reasonable time of 7.00am. Then it’s shower and dressed before heading downstairs. My husband works in Northampton and leaves for work much earlier than I do, so I tend to have breakfast alone before I head off to work. Living in Milton Keynes, I’m not too far from the office and the drive gives me a chance to relax and listen to music or a podcast.
At the office
Once in the office my first job of the day is to make a cup of tea. We are an office of avid tea drinkers so there’s never just me who wants one! Then I go through my diary and gather my thoughts. Generally, I work on one or two client files a day, sometimes more, depending on what work I am doing. Sitting in on and assisting Nicola with meetings takes up a big portion of my day, but I’m really enjoying this side of my role. It’s lovely getting to speak with our clients face to face as I’ve predominantly been behind the scenes up until now.
Any meeting that I attend, I type up the notes and create your Fact find document. This normally takes two or three hours. Whenever a new client comes on board, we create the Life Roadmap Report. This document takes hours of research and is the culmination of putting together all the information we ask for from the clients and the companies. It can be a very satisfying task to pull the report together, showing the client can be financially independent, sometimes earlier than planned and still living the life they want.
I also spend a lot of time working on Implementation Plans. These are the documents that detail specific recommendations, so where the Life Roadmap Report will say we should consider a pension transfer, the Implementation Plan actually looks at pension providers, charges, past performance etc, to determine which is the best suited to the client. This work is again very detailed and takes up a large portion of my time. Producing an Implementation Plan also includes completing the forms as much as possible prior to sending them to the clients as we want to make it as easy as possible for our clients.
After hours
I generally finish up anywhere between 5pm and 6pm most days, dependent on whether I’m in the middle of something or at a good point to stop for the day. I sometimes drop the post off and then I’m on my way, switching off from the details of the day, radio on and heading home.
Dinner is normally already planned, and with me home first most days I make a start on it. My evening is spent with my husband watching the latest popular series on Netflix, doing Yoga or going to the gym. I enjoy calming activities like Yoga and even nearly signed up for Yoga with Alpacas which would have been an experience!
Lockdown has changed my routine quite a bit as I no longer have to drive to work every day as we moved to working from home. My husband was furloughed and so he was also at home all day, every day. Luckily, we had a spare room I could use as an office so I could shut myself away!
My role didn’t particularly change though as we were able to continue working as normal, other than it being at home. The only thing that did change was my involvement in face-to-face meetings as these were no longer being held. With meeting generally being held via Zoom, although technically not face-to-face, we are still able to ‘see’ clients for their meetings.
Production
