London-based Chartered Financial Planner First Wealth has today launched a comprehensive guide to its 'Measure Wealth by Wellbeing' framework, asking clients to assess how they feel about how their finances affect their wellbeing.
The framework is based on the firm’s co-founder Anthony Villis's own experience and is designed to provide a different way of assessing financial wellbeing.
The aim is to move away from a purely financial assessment of Financial Planning success.
Mr Villis, managing director, said: "I spent a long time measuring the right things in the wrong way. I had a business, I had financial security, and by conventional measures, I was doing well.
“But I was often unhappy. It took a significant personal wake-up call to make me ask what I was actually planning for. That question is at the heart of everything we now do."
The wake-up call was a serious family health issue, and facing it helped Mr Villis decide to reset his family's priorities. It was then, he said, that he began to understand the difference between financial success and financial wellbeing.
That in turn led to the firm’s Measure Wealth by Wellbeing framework which, he said, moves beyond conventional measures of financial success to place client wellbeing at the centre of Financial Planning.
Mr Villis said: "There is a tendency in our industry to equate good Financial Planning with accumulating more stuff. The most meaningful work we do is with clients who have stopped asking ‘how much can I make’ and started asking ‘what’s it all for’.
“Measure Wealth by Wellbeing gives us a shared language for that conversation, and a way to track whether we are actually making a difference to how our clients are living today and thinking about the future."
He said the framework is built around six evidence-based pillars and grounded in academic research, including work from the Harvard Study of Adult Development and academic studies in behavioural finance and positive psychology.
The six pillars cover goal setting, Financial Planning, risk protection, financial independence, intergenerational planning, and values-aligned impact, with prompts at each stage to help clients assess where they stand.
A 16-question scorecard generates an overall wellbeing score for each client across the six pillars. First Wealth uses the scorecard to measure and evidence its impact on client outcomes over time, moving beyond the standard industry metric of investment returns.
The firm said it designed The Measure Wealth by Wellbeing guide to be accessible to anyone thinking seriously about their financial future, and is publishing it alongside an interactive self-assessment scorecard tool.
The six pillars in the Measure Wealth by Wellbeing framework are:
1. What Matters Most (goal setting and values alignment)
2. The Plan (structured financial planning)
3. The Curveballs (risk protection and financial resilience)
4. Financial Independence (working towards financial freedom)
5. Loved Ones (intergenerational planning and family financial conversations)
6. Impact (values-aligned investing and philanthropy)
First Wealth said the guide will integrate into its annual client review process as part of a broader rollout of the Measure Wealth by Wellbeing framework.