Simon Lloyd spent 25 years selling wine to Michelin-star restaurants. He knows what it looks like when people wait too long.
Wine collectors do it all the time. They buy a bottle (a really good one!) and they wait for the right occasion. A special dinner. A celebration. A moment worthy of the label. And they wait. And wait. Until eventually they open it, and it's past its best. The moment they saved it for never came.
"Don't save it. It's a Tuesday." - Simon's best advice from the latest episode of the NewIn podcast.
Yes - he's talking about wine. But he's also talking about life. And he's talking about why he decided at the age of 50 to retrain as a financial planner.
Simon had been thinking about a career change since he was 40. Life got in the way. Then he turned 50, and something shifted.
"I thought, if you want to do something, now is the time. Otherwise literally you will be too old."
He'd been managing a wine importing business, but the hours were unsustainable with a young family. More than that, he'd watched his father, someone who had worked hard all his life, spend his retirement dealing with a degenerative muscle condition. Retirement hadn't come with the freedom he'd earned.
Simon's 'take the leap' moment wasn't impulsive. It was 10 years in the making. And when it came, it was deliberate.
This is the thing that makes Simon's story so interesting for the financial services sector: the skills he'd spent 25 years developing — relationships, trust, long-term client management, the ability to sit with someone and understand what they actually want — turn out to be exactly the skills that make a great financial planner.
"The bit that interests me is the relationship," Simon says. "I've got customers I've been looking after for more than two decades. Family businesses where I know the parents and now the children. And I can see that happening in the financial world too."
One of the most striking things Simon says is about what he's learned about himself through the retraining process.
"I'm a lot less interested in money than I thought I was. Money is a tool. There's no point accumulating it forever and not doing anything with it."
He quotes Morgan Housel: every pound you save is a pound of freedom. Not a number. Not a target. Freedom.
That's a message that should be at the heart of every financial planning conversation. And it comes from someone who spent 25 years selling wine to people who kept it too long.
Hear the full conversation on the NewIn Podcast - available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and Amazon Music.
The NewIn podcast is brought to you with thanks to Royal London, Lead Sponsor of the Verve Foundation.
