130- How Many Good Summers Do You Have Left?

Benjamin takes a step back from the heavy finances this week and focuses instead on the heavier questions that we all need to ask ourselves from time to time. 

We're all aware of the finitude of time, but continue to 'plod on' with our financial plans, often with no clear end in sight. It's time to ask yourself these questions and re-focus on what really matters. Your finances should then be used to fit into that, not the other way around. 

Join Benjamin Mitchell (themoneyscot), serial hater of financial jargon, as he helps make your finances clearer and ensures you never make another financial mistake.

Getting on top of your personal finances doesn't need to be complicated or scary. Arm yourself with the only knowledge you need to transform yourself from money novice to money nerd! 

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Disclaimer - please note that nothing in this podcast can be relied upon as financial advice and the content is provided purely for information and guidance purposes. Please seek independent, regulated financial advice relevant to your situation.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Hello money nerds, it's Benjamin Mitchell. Welcome to Personal Finance Friday, another episode of Heads Up on Money. I hope you've all had a great week. It's going to be a short and sweet, but also quite a sombre message coming through in this week's episode. The perhaps elusive title, How Many Good Summers Do You Have Left? I'm going to be focusing this week on the principles around your wealth and why at the end of the day it's what you use it for that matters. Focus with the end in mind rather than focusing on the minutiae, the investment management, the tax planning, all of that stuff. Yeah, it's important to an extent, but it really is not all that important unless you're focusing on the bigger picture. So I'm going to keep this episode fairly brief. Hopefully, it will resonate with you and make you think about things in a different way. The reason why I've done it as a podcast episode is it was a blog article I sent out to my clients, I think it was towards the end of 2025, and it resonated with a lot of people. I got a lot of really positive feedback from it. They said, you know, Benjamin, it's nice to get something around these topics rather than just focusing on tax-year-end planning or looking to optimize your finances around the budget. All that stuff, it can become a little bit dry at times, and sometimes we need to, as human beings, take a step back from the finances and ultimately focus on what matters, which, as I've said many times in the podcast, is spending time and making memories with the people that matter most to you. So I'll put the question to you, money nerds. How many good summers do you have left in your life? Taking a step away from finances and your financial plan, but I'm talking about your life plan. How many good summers do you have left? And I'm not talking about the summers that you'll technically be alive for. I'm talking about the summers where you're actually healthy, fit, and able to really enjoy them. So as you get older, physical ailments creep in. You perhaps will have the inclination to do X, Y, or Z or travel, whatever it may be, but physically you may be unable to do it. You may not have the energy, you may not have the confidence to do whatever is on your bucket list to start whatever it is that is your adventure, as I say to clients, start your adventure. What if you don't have the physicality or the mental inclination to do that? Well, that robs you of a number of your available remaining summers. So if we look at how many good summers do you have left, and you think about that as a time that you're actually going to be inclined to do this, then it hits in a very different manner. So if you're in your mid-50s, maybe early 60s, as most of the clients I advise are, because naturally you're starting to think about retirement and the next stage of your life and what that may look like and what is or isn't affordable when you step back from the world of working and having an income coming in. So if you're in, let's say you're 60, then when you crunch these numbers, how many good summers do you have left? It starts to become a lot more sobering. And let's say, even if you're lucky enough to live until 90, well, that would be 30 summers maximum. And then you realize that when you filter out the ones that you're no longer physically fit to enjoy, or the ones that you're mentally able to enjoy, or have inclination to enjoy, the number really dwindles. Now, I'm not trying to be overly bleak here, folks, but I think it's really important to frame these things because with our money and with our finances, so many of us just muddle through, we just tick along and hope it's all going to be alright on the night. There's two camps of people I typically come across as those people who just bury their head in the sands and never really address the wider plan or what they are working towards or what they want from their wealth ultimately. Or there may be those people who think they're doing everything right and indeed are doing lots of the correct actions, but they're so predisposed to be focusing on perhaps a tangible figure that they've anchored on, or a nominal retirement date that has no reality to their own situation. Perhaps they've read that the state pension age is 67, so that's when they should retire, based on arbitrary figures, arbitrary numbers, and they may actually have the ability to retire now, but it's because they haven't asked these bigger questions, such as the one I'm framing in this very episode, is they don't have the drive, they don't even have the awareness to actually take a step back and say, okay, financially am I okay? And can we focus on the important stuff? Can we focus on the real meaning of wealth? It's not about investment returns, it's not about tax savings, it's not about investing in the right asset classes, no matter how often I tell you to do that, money nerds, it's about focusing on the real definition of wealth and what that means to you. And I get it that most of your life building wealth, saving was probably about money, saving, investing, building it, growing it, so that you've got this safety net there when you need it. But a point comes when you have to say, maybe maybe we have enough, or seek financial advice, or crunch this properly yourself and test, do we have enough? Can we do everything that we want to do? Because that can buy you back time. And suddenly what may have been 20 good summers remaining can be 25, and that extra five are five summers when you're likely to be fitter, healthier, happier, and have more inclination to do whatever is on your bucket list, whatever forms part of your adventure. And this should all be fairly fresh in our minds. We had the COVID pandemic just coming up to six years ago now, which is in itself bonkers and reiterates and reinforces the point I'm trying to make that time slips by and fast. We should be questioning this with a better lens than we do. We thought that the COVID pandemic would reframe this and allow us to focus more on life and work-life balance and family, but we're we're slipping back into our old ways. I see it all the time with the clients that I advise, and life is busy, I get that, but you need to take a step back and recognise how fragile life is. If you had your time again, would you have done it differently? And financial planning can allow you to do that, and that is no exaggeration, and it's why I love my job. It's because it looks at your life through the lens of a financial angle, and for many people that's a barrier or source of anxiety that doesn't allow them to look at the wider picture because they don't think they can financially do it. Well, what if you can? So I really urge you on this personal finance Friday to ask yourself the difficult questions. How many good summers do you think we have left? If we retire now, what might that mean for our retirement journey? Are we going to have greater inclination to travel now? We're fit, we're healthy, God willing, touch wood, we're going to remain that way, but should we be seizing the day now? And it really sounds a bit cliched. I get that money nerds, but that's what this episode is here for, is to actually bring this stuff that you know you should be doing to the forefront of your mind. Question yourself, how many books can you still read in your lifetime? How many more trips can you have with your partner where you're both strong and healthy? How many opportunities are you going to have to gift some of your money to your loved ones and see them enjoy it in your lifetime? Ask these questions. They're difficult, I appreciate it, but question how many good summers do you actually have left? The kind where you can fully enjoy the summer. And when releasing this episode in the winter, when things are a bit gloomier, a bit bleaker, and a bit darker, certainly are here in Edinburgh. So going into the 2026 summer that's ahead of us, start thinking about this. I really encourage you to do so and really test the question of are you already there? Can you already afford to do it? Because if it's not now, then when? And without being too bleak, none of us know what's around the corner. And I always say to clients, it's about finding your wealth balance, it's about yes, doing enough for the future, that's important, don't get me wrong, but also not doing so much that it detracts from the enjoyment of today or puts all your eggs in the basket of a future that you know or don't know may come. You want to be doing just enough now. And if you're already in that position, then why aren't you seizing it? So the point of this podcast episode isn't to scare you, it isn't to be overly bleak or pessimistic, already fairly bleak and pessimistic time of year, but it's to reframe your focus. And I hope this has just planted a little seed, even if two or three listeners of this episode suddenly think, you know what, maybe this is the year. This is the year that we actually ask these questions and and really focus on what do we want the next chapter of our lives to look like. And financial planning fits into that because it can give you the tools and the confidence to actually unlock that future and bringing your finances into it. Financial planning, it's usually about investments, it's usually about investment products, insurances, tax planning, retirement advice. But that stuff is all pretty much useless and irrelevant if you don't focus on the wider financial plan. And the best financial plans should focus on time and the people that matter most to you, so that you have the freedom to spend your days how you want with the people you want to and do the things that you want to do that make you happy, so that you can enjoy every remaining summer that you have got left. I know it's a bit of a cheesy one this week, money nerds, but I can't give you tax planning guidance every single week. Sometimes we have to focus on what really matters. So have I planted a seed there? Really hope I have. If it's resonated well with you in any way, let me know. Would love to know if you're enjoying these kind of episodes and a break from the norm. And if you are, then please like, subscribe, comment, send me a message. All the details are in the show notes every week, money nerds. I have been Benjamin Mitchell, your host. We're going to wrap it up there. We're gonna keep it a shorter episode this week. But I'll leave you with the question once again to let it percolate through the week. How many good summers do you have left? I'll see you next week. Goodbye for now.