Send us Fan Mail

In this episode, Steve is joined by Rhiannon Goff, founder of SENDA (Special Educational Needs and Disability Advisors) and a financial adviser with 26 years of experience, the last 10 of which she has spent working exclusively with families who have a child or relative with special needs.

The traditional financial planning playbook assumes a future of independence: get money into the client's hands, maximise their inheritance, plan towards their retirement. For around one in five children in England, that playbook can quietly do harm. Inheritance can wipe out means-tested care. Junior ISAs that mature at 18 can disqualify someone from support. And money in the wrong hands can turn an already vulnerable person into a target.

This episode looks at what financial planning actually has to look like when the person at the centre of the plan might be non-verbal, dependent on means-tested care, or at risk of exploitation — and why this work shouldn't sit on the periphery of the profession.

In this conversation, you'll hear about:

• Rhiannon's personal route into the field via her 16-year-old son Tristan, who has complex autism and is non-verbal, and how that lived experience shaped her practice.
• The ARC framework — Access, Risk and Care — and why every special needs financial plan has to be tested against all three.
• Why the natural estate planning instinct (get the money to the child) can be the single most damaging move a family makes.
• The role of trusts in special needs planning, particularly discretionary and disabled or vulnerable person's trusts, and how they protect against the "three harms".
• "Mate crime" — financial exploitation by people who befriend a vulnerable person — and why protection has to be balanced against autonomy.
• Why Junior ISAs are usually the wrong vehicle for a child with complex needs, including a real-world story involving a car auction, four bangers and a cul-de-sac.
• Steve's lived experience as a brother to someone with similar needs, and how his family has navigated bank limits and the tension between protection and independence.
• The importance of building "a team to carry on" — solicitors, trustees, accountants, planners and family — before the parents' hand is forced.
• How to find the right professionals: looking for TEP (Trust and Estate Practitioner) members, vulnerable client experience, and links to professional trustee corporations.
• The launch of SENDA in 2024, the LIBF-accredited foundation course now available for financial planners, and the community Rhiannon is building to support both advisers and families.
• Rhiannon's closing call: be ambitious. Don't plan around what someone can't do — plan towards what they can.

Key takeaway:

Rhiannon's argument is that special needs planning isn't a niche corner of the profession — it's a field where standard financial planning instincts can actively cause harm if applied without thought. The damage is rarely about bad intentions; it's about gaps in knowledge, professionals working in silos, and well-meaning grandparents funnelling money into vehicles that quietly disqualify a young person from the care they need. The fix is genuine collaboration, the right qualifications, and a mindset shift towards ambitious, hopeful planning. Build the team while you still can, look forward not back, and signpost to the right specialist even if you're not one yourself.

Send us Fan Mail

In this episode, Steve is joined by Sonya Lutter, a researcher and money psychologist based at Texas Tech and the founder of the Institute for Systemic Financial Professionals. Sonya has spent years studying what actually happens inside couples and households when money turns up — and turns up the temperature.

Most fights about money aren't really about money. They're about values, identity, and what we want our lives to mean. And yet the financial planning profession still spends most of its training time on investments, tax and retirement, while the human bit — the bit that decides whether any of the plan actually gets followed — usually gets a single course.

This episode looks at why money sits so close to our sense of self, what the research actually says about couples, conflict and joint accounts, and the small, practical tools advisers and clients can use to make better long-term decisions rather than panicked short-term ones.

In this conversation, you'll hear about:

• Sonya's accidental route into the field, from wanting to teach deaf children, to financial planning, to marriage and family therapy.
• Why the profession still underestimates psychology — and why "we haven't got time for that in a one-hour meeting" is the wrong answer.
• The research finding that how much a couple argues about money early in a relationship predicts long-term relationship satisfaction more reliably than later arguments do.
• Scott Rick's two-year study on couples and joint accounts: why being told to combine accounts measurably increased relationship satisfaction, while the other two groups declined.
• Why disparity in earnings — and especially women out-earning their husbands — is statistically associated with more money arguments and a higher divorce risk.
• The "values bullseye" exercise Sonya uses with couples who've spent decades skirting around the same disagreements, and how it turns vague conflict into a shared centre.
• The childhood roots of financial anxiety, and the research showing that hearing parents argue about money tracks into adult behaviour — while simply receiving an allowance largely doesn't.
• Why cold hands are a literal red flag for short-term decision-making: the fight-or-flight response routes blood away from the brain, and we end up agreeing to things we don't actually want.
• A practical "sandwich technique" for opening up emotional conversations with clients who came in to talk about investments and don't think they signed up for anything else.
• Why financial advisers carry more emotional weight than the profession admits, and why some form of study group, supervision or coaching is not optional once you're listening to people for a living.

Key takeaway:

Sonya's central argument is that the psychology of money has been approached haphazardly so far — a tool here, a technique there — without a proper framework. Money isn't just a preference like toothpaste or what to watch on TV. It's a near-direct reflection of values, identity and the family system someone grew up inside. The advisers and couples who do well are the ones who stop treating the emotional layer as a tangent and start treating it as the main event. And the tip Sonya leaves listeners with applies whether you're an adviser, a client or just a human being in a relationship: see a need, meet a need.

Send us Fan Mail

In this episode, Steve and Jess talk about why our brains chase certainty, why money can't really deliver it, and how to build a financial and psychological life that bends with whatever comes.

Certainty is one of those things almost everyone wants and almost no one can have. Our brains are wired to chase it, our spreadsheets pretend to deliver it, and politicians, advertisers and well-meaning financial guarantees all dangle versions of it in front of us.

This episode looks at why that craving sits so deep, why money is a particularly bad place to look for it, and what a healthier relationship with uncertainty actually looks like in practice — across investing, careers, family life and the small daily routines that keep us functioning.

In this conversation, you'll hear about:

• Why we crave certainty in the first place, and what evolutionary wiring has to do with predictable berries, hypervigilance and modern information overload.
• Morgan Housel's line that "the illusion of control is more persuasive than the reality of uncertainty", and why feeling in control often matters more than being in control.
• Alex Hormozi's idea that the wealth you build later in life depends on how much uncertainty you can put up with, and what that means for jobs, businesses and investing.
• Why guarantees in finance usually come at the cost of lower returns, and why money sat in the bank can quietly lose value to inflation.
• How to build a financial plan that's "bendy like the grass" (courtesy of one of Steve's clients), with cash buffers, diversification, stress testing and plans A through F.
• Why obsessing over forecasts and spreadsheets doesn't change the universe, and where that energy is better spent.
• How OCD, eating disorders and addictions can begin as attempts to feel in control before quietly taking control of the person instead.
• Practical ways to train your brain to sit with uncertainty: keep some routines to lower your mental load, then deliberately push your comfort zone in small ways like changing your route to work.
• A few tangents along the way, including Santorini photoshoots, a German sun-bed lawsuit, galloping horses in Morocco and whether tea is due a comeback.
• The closing reminder: "Ships are safe in the harbour, but that's not what ships are for."

Key takeaway:

The only real certainty is change, and trying to engineer guaranteed outcomes tends to cost you twice: once in the price you pay for the guarantee, and again in the smaller, duller life you have to live to keep things predictable. The healthier move is to control what's worth controlling (your coffee, your keys, how you load the dishwasher), then build enough flexibility into your financial plan, your mindset and your week that you can ride the wobbles instead of trying to flatten them. Plans A, B, C, D, E and F. A bit of jelly wobble is what makes the whole thing worth eating.