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In this episode, Steve is joined by Ellie Pemberton, chartered financial planner at Lucent (and, at 25, one of the youngest chartered advisers in the profession) while Jess is off on holiday. It's the second in a semi-planned series where Steve turns the microphone on the people at Lucent that clients may or may not have met the ones actually doing the work.
Ellie fell into financial planning the way almost everyone does. She googled "finance places near me" during the summer after her first year at Liverpool, messaged a handful of managing directors on LinkedIn, and one said yes to a coffee. Six years on, she is a chartered adviser at Lucent, has done her professional exams faster than most, and has already built a book of clients who have walked over hot coals, retired years earlier than they expected, and one who was told after seeing five advisers that Ellie and Steve were the only ones who actually listened.
In this conversation, you'll hear about:
- The Liverpool coffee-and-LinkedIn story that got Ellie into a financial planning firm entirely by accident, and why she thinks the profession is far too invisible to young people
- What she loves about the job the blend of technical problem-solving and human psychology, and the professional euphemism for being "very nosy"
- Getting chartered fast: the six-month diploma sprint (an exam a month for six months), and why Lucent having all five advisers chartered is unusual in a profession where only around 20% carry the qualification
- The lesson the exams could not teach her that it doesn't matter how technically correct the plan is if you cannot communicate it in a way the client understands
- Being young and female in a profession where the average adviser age is 48, and Ellie's blunt take on the "clients won't like you because you're young" advice she was given at 20
- The genuine advantages of a younger adviser thinking about your retirement rather than their own, sticking around long enough to see it through, and helping the next generation too
- The fire walker story: the client who retired, then went on to do charity events walking over hot coals, glass and breaking arrows on their neck
- The moment Ellie first told a client "yes, you can retire" and the 74 times she'd checked it first
- Ellie and Steve's new YouTube channel, Ellie and Steve Tackle, and why they think the profession's information needs unpacking for a generation getting its financial advice from TikTok
- Carl Richards' line that clients don't hire advisers for technical knowledge they hire them for what that knowledge lets them do
- The closing case for peace of mind: why the best question a client can ask is not "what does it cost?" but what they'll know afterwards that they don't know now
Key takeaway
Ellie's argument is that the future of financial planning does not sit inside the exam syllabus or the pension calculator. It sits inside the ability to sit with a person, actually listen, and communicate the answer in a way that lets them do the thing they came in wanting to do retire earlier than they thought, take on the fire-walking gig, give a leg-up to family, or simply relax into the plan they have already worked their whole life to earn. The exams matter. The chartered status matters. But communication matters more.
