My name is Jane Waugh and I’ve been working with Sarah for about three or four years now.

I was coming up to thinking about retirement when I first got in touch with Sarah, and I had a recommendation from a friend of mine who I previously worked with, Sarah had sorted her pension out for her. She rang me and said, I’d like to recommend Sarah to you.

I liked Sarah when I first met her because she was very friendly, easy to talk to, she took a long time to get to know me and to understand what it was I was looking for. What I wanted out of retirement, what were my financial goals, what were the big expensive items coming up in the future for me, planning out my retirement with me.

Sarah played a really important part in planning my retirement with me because I had no idea how much my pension was worth. I have lots of different pension pots from different companies that needed bringing together. I had very firm views about what I wanted to do with my money. But to be honest, I didn’t even know how much money I was going to have to retire on. Sarah helped me unpack everything, come up with a plan, look at my financial goals, work through them, and help me understand how we could build my pension around the future that I was looking to have.

I have total confidence in Sarah and everything she’s done with me, the advice she’s given me, the financial plan she’s provided me with. She has a fantastic spreadsheet that helps you look at where you’re going to be financially. You can project what your spending will be over a certain period of years. She can project from that what your income will be and how much your pension will be worth. We’ve looked right through until I’m 80. I’m 59 now so we’ve financially planned, broad brush planned until I’m 80.

I think that Sarah has helped me build massive confidence around my pension. I’ve always been very concerned about money. I’ve always worked incredibly hard and had quite demanding jobs and saved for the future. I knew that financially, we were going to be secure. But what Sarah has done is helped me to understand the detail behind how we’re going to manage the money and make it work for me and get the best out of it. Also, inheritance planning, which I knew nothing about. I would have had no idea of how to tackle that. She’s also recommended who to go to make wills, how to set the wills up in terms of trusts. She’s just been there every step of the way to support me and hold my hand really.

Seeking financial advice before you retire is massively important. I started financial planning with Sarah three years before I actually retired. It took almost 12 months to undo the various pensions and put them all together in a personal pension pot. If we hadn’t have started when we did, my finances wouldn’t have been in the right place for me to retire and pick a retirement date that I wanted to work to. My biggest piece of advice to anybody who’s thinking about retiring is to go and get advice early. I couldn’t recommend Sarah highly enough.

How would I describe Sarah? She’s a fantastic listener, she’s very caring in terms of what’s right for you as an individual and what you want to get out of the process. But most of all, she is financially both acute and astute.

The best thing about working with Sarah for me personally has been the amount of time she spent with me to get to know me, to understand me. I would count her as a friend, and I haven’t seen her hundreds of times. I’ve met with her maybe four times a year over the three years that I’ve been planning for my retirement. I’ve got to know her very well, and she’s got to know me very well.

I couldn’t recommend Sarah highly enough for anybody in my circumstance – who know what they want to get out of retirement and know that they have some decent pensions coming, but have no idea of how to tackle the future or how to bring pension pots together, or what’s right for them in retirement. Sarah is incredible at unpicking all the financial aspects of your life and bringing them all together in what for me has been an incredible pension plan.