There are certain stages in life when Financial Planning advice is vitally important and one of those periods is the years leading up to retirement.

There is a lot more to Financial Planning than adding up numbers or inputting data into a cashflow modeller.

In the race to rebrand, go digital, attract private equity, embrace artificial intelligence, adopt ESG - and all the other modern trends - it’s often forgotten that what really matters to most clients is for their provider or adviser to be around for the long term.

I have to confess to being in two minds about the key announcement from the Government this week about the rise in National Insurance and dividend taxation, ostensibly to pay for social care.

The next generation of Financial Planners is at last coming from a wider range of backgrounds, including graduate entry and that, mostly, is a very good thing.

The fall in life expectancy for men, revealed this week by ONS, was perhaps not such a big surprise given that more than 130,000 people have sadly lost their lives to Covid-19 over the past 18 months.

The unexpected resignation today of under fire CII CEO Sian Fisher is neither the end of the story for the Personal Finance Society, nor realistically even a solution to the crisis that has beset both the CII and PFS in recent times.

The money laundering regulations are supposed to be a dull but routine part of financial services business, as any Financial Planner will attest.

The pandemic is not over yet, far from it, and it is too early to predict the long term impact but if there is one certainty it is that many people’s retirement plans are changing.

Consumers just do not trust financial services firms, that’s the long and the short of it.