Financial wellbeing planning, the discipline that places a client’s relationship with money at the centre of the advisory process, is gaining ground among UK practitioners, and Chris Budd’s work helps explain why that shift matters to anyone managing wealth over the long term.
Budd, author of The Four Cornerstones of Financial Wellbeing, argues that traditional financial advice has already passed through one upgrade, the move to cashflow-based financial planning, and is now mid-way through a second. That second upgrade is the formal integration of wellbeing principles into how advisers structure client conversations and construct plans.
Why Anxiety Is a Portfolio Risk Advisers Cannot Ignore
The case for taking this seriously begins with the data. According to the Mental Health Foundation, an average of 37.1% of women and 29.9% of men reported high levels of anxiety in 2022/23. For advisers whose work involves persuading clients to commit capital, hold positions through volatility, or draw down in retirement, that is not merely a pastoral concern. Anxiety distorts financial decision-making, shortens time horizons and increases the temptation to abandon a plan at precisely the wrong moment.
Budd’s point is that a financial plan constructed without reference to a client’s emotional relationship with money may actually compound that anxiety. Discussing pensions, investments and tax in isolation, without addressing the fears and self-narratives a client brings to the table, risks delivering a technically sound plan that the client never fully engages with.
Sense of Coherence: A Framework Worth Knowing
To give the wellbeing argument more rigour, Budd draws on work by medical sociologist Aaron Antonovsky, who in 1979 developed the concept of a “sense of coherence” while studying why individuals with identical illnesses recovered at different rates. Antonovsky identified three factors that supported better outcomes: the ability to make sense of one’s situation, having the tools to manage it, and understanding why managing it matters.
Applied to financial wellbeing planning, this framework asks how money intersects with each of those three capacities. A client who cannot make sense of why they are saving, who feels powerless over day-to-day spending, or who has never articulated what their wealth is actually for, is unlikely to engage meaningfully with even a technically excellent financial plan.
Budd notes that money has become intertwined with self-worth in ways that can actively undermine coherence. The trade-off between time and status, sacrificing family time to accumulate wealth beyond what one needs, in order to signal success to people one may never meet, is one he identifies as a recurring and largely unexamined tension in client relationships. Practitioners registered with professional bodies such as the Personal Finance Society are increasingly expected to address these behavioural dimensions, and the Financial Conduct Authority‘s Consumer Duty framework similarly emphasises outcomes that reflect clients’ actual needs and circumstances, not simply their stated risk tolerance.
What This Means for Long-Term Engagement
For advisers working with clients in drawdown or approaching retirement, the engagement argument carries particular weight. Budd observes that many clients barely look at their investments between annual reviews, which may protect them from short-term noise but can also mean they have lost any meaningful connection to what their money is for.
Focusing client conversations on the financial plan rather than the underlying portfolio, and ensuring that plan is built around a genuinely examined vision of a happier future, significantly increases the likelihood that clients will stay committed to it over a five-to-ten-year horizon. A plan a client believes in is a plan a client will hold through a difficult market. That is the practical case for financial wellbeing planning, and it is one that sits squarely within the duties of any adviser who takes long-term outcomes seriously.
