Think about the last financial plan you worked on for a couple.
Who led the conversation? Whose risk profile shaped the recommendations? And if one partner wasn’t at the meeting – or didn’t really engage when they were – how much of a difference did that make to the plan you produced?
If you’re not sure, that might be the point.
As paraplanners, we work with the information we’re given. But some of the most consequential decisions in financial planning – which pension gets the contributions, how retirement income is structured, what happens when one partner dies – can be based on assumptions that nobody has explicitly questioned. And more often than not, it’s women who are most exposed when those assumptions go unexamined.
This Assembly is a chance to look at three of those assumptions directly: where they come from, what they cost clients, and what paraplanners can do about them.
Three recurring assumptions that could be impacting women’s financial future
We’ve chosen three assumptions that come up again and again in financial planning for couples, and that can have a disproportionate impact on women’s financial outcomes.
They span different life stages, so wherever your clients are in their financial journey, there’s likely to be something that resonates.
For each one, we explored how it shows up in real planning situations, what can go wrong for clients, and what the risks are – before asking the practical question: what can a paraplanner actually do about it?
Host Sam Tonks was joined by Women’s Wealth founder, Sam Secomb, and Susan Hope, Business Development Director at Scottish Widows.
Together they worked through each assumption, shared practical ideas, and had a (very) honest conversation about how paraplanners can raise these issues with planners in a way that gets heard.
During this Assembly Sam T, Sam S and Susan covered:
Here are links, articles and further reading mentioned during this Assembly.
Watch the replay at Crowdcast (with chat)
Sam Secomb’s Telegraph article
Hers and His: Opening up the family budget from the Fawcett Society
Women and Wealth: Building Better Advice Relationships
Women in Retirement insights from Scottish Widows
Living with and beyond cancer in 2045
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