The starting point for us is just to meet with people and find out if we can help them plan for their retirement or save for their children’s education or deal with an inheritance or potential inheritance for example.

We meet a lot of business owners and self employed people and advise them on how they can extract funds in a tax efficient way from their business too.

We have a strong working relationship with accountants and, though we’re not tax advisors, we do stray into the area of tax advice all the time as some of the solutions that we put in place for people involve tax planning, so although we’re not qualified tax advisors we do have a great understanding of tax, and tax regulations and legislation that’s certainly not exciting or interesting until you need a solution

For people who have children and are looking at the prospect of at least giving their children the opportunity to go to college – I’ve three children what I don’t know is if any or all of them are going to go to college, you know, but I want to make sure that we have in place, and I want my clients to make sure that they have a plan in place, that will allow their children to go to college – we don’t want a barrier there for them.

Planning is crucial to how we help people and but there’s also reminding people to claim the tax any tax reliefs or benefits that are available and grants.

Retirement Planning is probably it’s the biggest part of what we do and it’s the it’s the part that gets me so excited, and you know going back to why I do my job. I do think that the world of work and careers is changing and I think the word Retirement is almost going to become redundant in certain ways, because so many people changing career or changing profession, or maybe reducing their hours of work. There’s so much opportunity out there now with the working environment as it is now for people to have a change of direction and maybe work reduced hours, or maybe go into a whole new area.

Where we come into the equation is making sure that, if you do want to pursue a new career, or if you do want to kick back relax and throw the feet up for the next 20 or 30 years of your life, that you can do that but it’s different for everybody. Working on a reduced scale is certainly becoming more popular as we are all living longer , well in to retirement and people want more flexibility and less stress.

Putting a plan in place to help people understand no 1: what they want to do and no 2: how we’re going to help them achieve that. I have been doing this job for 20 years and maybe what separates us from tax advisors and other financial brokers is our personal approach, meeting people and getting to know people and their situation.

Our industry sometimes has a bad name – like product sellers or sales people but that’s certainly not the case. We still have a few barriers to break down in our industry and how we help people is through building trust. We’re here to meet people and findout their situation and help where we can. Sometimes we meet someone and they’re fine as they are with a really good plan in place or perhaps they do need some help but we are not the right people, in which case we would advise them to go to X or Y. We operate a system where we meet people once initially to see where they’re at, and then if we can help them we move things forward to a second meeting.

Business owners – I am one myself – and having a pension plan is the ultimate exit. When I set up my business someone said to me – “the day you start is the day you should be planning to leave“. Good advice. We’re all going to leave at some stage so it’s important to plan.

I started my career working for a company in Dublin who dealt with solely high net worth self employed individual, some professional sports people for eg. It was a fantastic star to my career as a young 22-23 year old and then I branched off and started to work with people in the public sector. It’s something I continue to do – working with self employed and business owners and with our sister company MadeSimple.ie we also help public and civil servants understand their benefits and options for retirement.  As a business owner you have the potential to generate your own level of income whereas in the public sector ( and I’m married to a teacher) your income is set and generally no matter how hard you work you still get paid the same amount, unless you get a promotion. So we do help people in the public sector – teachers, nurses within the HSE, all across the board really and we’ve been doing that – very successfully I might add, for a number of years.

We ran a poll in August and the cost of living was the biggest challenge most people are facing – unfortunately a lot of that is outside our control, but managing our finances is within our control and that’s where we come into play, helping people on how to increase their income or reduce their outgoings.

There’s also a worrying trend across social media from keyboard warriors about how to manage your finances and get rich quick – whether that’s through investing in individual shares or buying cryptocurrency or even flipping houses. This may work for some but it’s not always the best advise for others. Also there is an exponential growth of scam artists out there now so it’s really important for people to be sure they are speaking with an authorised advisor about their finances. Do look them up and make sure that the person you re dealing with is authorised and regulated to deal with you”.