Hi, I’m Paul and I’ve been working with Sarah for 15 or 16 years now.

Everything that we’ve worked on together has been around pension planning and planning for my retirement.

I retired in March of 2016 and prior to that, for the 15 or 16 years that I was working with Sarah, everything was about making sure the investments were right, so that we could get this early retirement in. She very much helped me with understanding what we needed to be taking into account in our pension planning, both from a point of view of the investments, but also in understanding what our living costs and so on, we’re going to be once we were retired.

It would have been very difficult to retire if Sarah hadn’t been advising us, because she was able to come to me at the right times and say “Paul, if you want to retire by your target date (which was 60 originally) then you have to do X, Y, Z. These are your different options. I recommend this particular one, but you can make your own choice.”

Can you ask me to describe Sarah in three words? I would use, first of all, friend. Secondly, professional, and third, understanding.

She’s taken the trouble over the years to understand our family. Not that we have any particular difficulties as a family, but she understands the family. She understands what we want to achieve with our finances, and how we see that benefiting both us and the family in the longer term. Our targets were to be able to live comfortably, and to be able to travel. We’ve been able to achieve both of those so far – and I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t continue.

The best thing really, in all honesty, about working with Sarah is that over the years we have been working together I feel we’ve become friends. I would regard her as a trusted friend – much more than being my financial adviser. I see her as a friend who is able to give me good advice.

I have recommended KBA to two of my sons. My third son is never going to be in a position to buy property or make investments because he has supported living in the community. But my eldest boy and my youngest boy, I have said to them “when you are ready to buy houses, when you are thinking about pensions, then I have found that Sarah has been very good to us, and I do suggest that you speak to her.”