Halfway Through The Year: Are You Still Living The Life You Said You Wanted?

It’s hard to believe we’re already halfway through the year.

January often starts with good intentions. We set goals, make plans and tell ourselves that this will be the year we finally get around to the things that matter most. Whether it’s spending more time with family, looking after our health, travelling more, reducing stress or simply creating a better balance between work and life, most of us begin the year with a picture in our minds of what we’d like life to look like.

Then, as it tends to do, life gets in the way.

Work becomes busy. Family commitments fill the diary. Unexpected opportunities and challenges appear. Before we know it, summer arrives and we’re left wondering where the first six months have gone.

At this point in the year, it’s worth asking a simple question.

Are you still living the life you said you wanted at the start of the year?

Not the life that has evolved through circumstance, habit or necessity. The life you consciously wanted to create.

One of the things we’ve learned through years of working with clients is that Financial Planning is rarely about money alone. In fact, the most meaningful conversations we have often have very little to do with Investments, Pensions or Tax Planning.

Instead, they tend to revolve around questions such as:

Am I spending enough time with the people I care about?

Am I enjoying life today, or am I constantly postponing it until some future date?

Am I using my money as a tool to support the life I want, or has the pursuit of money become the goal itself?

These aren’t always comfortable questions to ask, but they are important ones.

It’s remarkably easy to drift through life. Most people don’t wake up one morning and consciously decide to neglect their health, work too much or spend less time with family. It tends to happen gradually. Small compromises become habits, habits become routines and before long we find ourselves living a version of life that isn’t quite the one we intended.

That’s why we think the halfway point of the year can be more useful than New Year itself.

January is full of ambition. July offers perspective.

It gives us an opportunity to step back, look at how the year has unfolded so far and make adjustments where needed. Not because anything has gone wrong, but because life is constantly changing and our plans need to evolve alongside it.

If somebody looked at your diary over the last six months, would they be able to identify what matters most to you? Would they see time spent on the people, experiences and priorities that are important to you? Or would they see a calendar dominated by things that simply felt urgent at the time?

There are no right or wrong answers.

The important thing is taking the time to ask the question.

After all, Financial Planning has never really been about reaching the end of the year with a bigger bank balance. It’s about using your resources, your time and your opportunities in a way that helps you build a life you’ll be proud to look back on.

And if the first half of the year hasn’t looked exactly how you’d hoped, the good news is that there’s still half of it left.

What Would Your 90-Year-Old Self Tell You To Do This Summer?

A slightly unusual question this month.

Imagine for a moment that you could sit down with the 90-year-old version of yourself. Imagine they had the benefit of hindsight, decades of life experience and the opportunity to offer you one piece of advice for the summer ahead.

What do you think they would say?

It’s an interesting exercise because it forces us to look beyond the noise of everyday life. The deadlines, emails, meetings, headlines and to-do lists that consume so much of our attention today often look very different when viewed through the lens of a lifetime.

We spend a great deal of time thinking about the future. We worry about Retirement, Investments, inflation, interest rates and whether we’re making the right Financial decisions. These things matter, of course, and they deserve careful thought.

However, when we speak to people in later life, the conversations rarely centre around investment returns or tax allowances.

More often than not, they talk about people.

They talk about the holidays they took, the memories they created, the friendships they maintained and the time they spent with children, grandchildren and loved ones. They remember the experiences that brought joy, the opportunities they embraced and, occasionally, the things they wish they hadn’t put off for quite so long.

One of the great ironies of Financial Planning is that people often assume the objective is to accumulate wealth. In reality, wealth is simply the tool. The objective is the life that wealth allows you to live.

That’s why we often encourage clients to think beyond the numbers.

A successful Financial Plan isn’t measured solely by the size of an Investment Portfolio or the value of a Pension. It’s measured by whether it helps you spend more time doing the things that matter most to you, both now and in the future.

This feels particularly relevant when you consider that many of us are likely to live longer than previous generations. Recent projections suggest that reaching 90 may become increasingly common, while living well into our nineties may no longer be the exception it once was.

That is wonderful news.

But it also serves as an important reminder that life isn’t something that begins when we retire. It isn’t something that starts once the Mortgage is paid off, the children have grown up or the Pension reaches a certain value.

Life is happening now.

So perhaps, as summer unfolds, take a moment to consider what advice your 90-year-old self might offer.

Would they encourage you to spend another evening worrying about the latest political headline? Would they want you to spend more time checking your Investment valuations?

Or would they suggest taking the trip, making the phone call, spending more time with family, creating memories and making the most of a season of life that you’ll never get back?

We suspect most 90-year-olds would have a fairly clear answer.

And it’s probably worth listening to.