The France Show by Kelly Roberts

How / why did you get into your line of work in the financial services sector?

I’ve always been very service orientated, whether it was waiting tables in my teens or building and maintaining Enterprise network infrastructures in Spain and Portugal. I enjoy understanding complex, underlying concepts and I get great satisfaction when I can translate it into something my clients understand, relate to and see the benefits of. I got into financial services because I felt that it was very similar to my background in IT in that I continue to build networks, bridges and connections, however this time it’s not with equipment, it’s with people.

“Fortunate, indeed, is the man who takes exactly the right measure of himself and holds a just balance between what he can acquire and what he can use.” These words, written by The eighteenth century English physician and educator Philip Latham, could just as easily have been written about trying to achieve the balance between spending happily in the present and saving prudently for retirement.

However, the question of how to do this effectively is not one that is easily answered. As it happens, too many retirement savers find that they either spend profligately in the present, thereby jeopardising their retirement lifestyle, or they prepare with too much caution, experiencing years of unnecessary frugality only to reach retirement with more money than they really need.