Why "fair" doesn't mean "equal" (and other things worth saying out loud)
What we talked about this week (and why it matters)
Some episodes cover one big idea. Episode 103 covered about six of them. Here is what stuck with us.
The pension consolidation case just changed
For years, the argument for consolidating pension pots was straightforward: lower charges, simpler admin, better engagement. Keith Butten made a point that has been rattling around in our heads ever since. When you consolidate a client's pensions, something shifts psychologically. They stop thinking of their retirement savings as scattered fragments and start treating it as a real asset. They engage. They contribute more. The behavioural benefit, he argued, dwarfs the difference in platform charges.
But there is now a harder, more urgent reason to consolidate.
From April 2026, pensions fall into the inheritance tax regime in the UK. Executors will have to account for the full pension value at the date of death, not the value when the money is eventually distributed. If the fund falls between those two points, the estate still pays tax on the higher figure. There is no loss relief, unlike property. And if your client has five or six pension pots scattered across different providers, their personal representatives will be dealing with five or six sets of paperwork, five or six sets of fund movements, potentially five or six different valuations, at one of the hardest moments of their lives.
Consolidation is no longer just a tidy thing to do. It is an act of care.
Fair does not mean equal
Keith opened the show with a point about family gifting that we think a lot of advisers quietly agree with but rarely say out loud. Treating children equally is not always the right thing to do. One child might be financially reckless. Another might be a teacher who cannot get on the property ladder. A third might not need the money at all. Holding back from the sensible ones to keep things even is not fairness. It is a failure of advice.
Alan added a useful frame: build a family values exercise around it. What matters to this family? What are they willing to support financially? Education, a first home, starting a business? That conversation, done properly, is something no product and no algorithm will ever replace.
The hedge fund that had no rules
Leopold Aschenbrenner, 25 years old, former OpenAI researcher, valedictorian, raised a fund called Situational Awareness to 46 billion dollars. The investor document, as reported by the New York Times, stated it would set no limits on the types of investments it might make, nor on the concentration of its investments, or the amount of leverage it may use.
It went badly wrong. Short positions, leveraged heavily, moved against him. The fund collapsed. Citadel stepped in and bought the assets below par value. The backers included Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Bank of America, and some of the most celebrated names in Silicon Valley.
We did a whole episode on star fund managers not long ago. Here is the next chapter. The story never changes. Leverage, conviction, hubris, margin call. Every generation produces a new one. Every generation watches the same ending.
The best thing you can do for your clients is be relentlessly, unapologetically boring.
Employee ownership: a different kind of exit
Keith has taken Boost Financial Planning through an employee ownership trust. Not a PE sale. Not an MBO. A structure where, once the founders are paid fair market value for their shares, all profits eventually belong to the whole team.
He was honest about the timeline: somewhere between 10 and 12 years before what he calls Freedom Day, when the trust is clear and the team owns everything. That is a long time. But as he put it, a long time is better than no time, because no other exit route gets you there at all.
His point about culture is worth sitting with. An EOT will not work in every firm. But in a firm that already feels like a work family, where the clients belong to the business and not to any one individual, where the mission is collective: it might be exactly right.
We do not tell our clients to optimise for the short term. It would be strange to do the opposite with our own businesses.
Watch episode 103 in full
There is more in the episode than we could fit here: service level segmentation, the compliance grey area around buying gilts directly, the FCA levy, and a hedge fund wedding that was happening simultaneously with a margin call.
Watch or listen to episode 103 now. Link below:
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P.S. Keith Butten has been running masterclasses for financial planners for several years now, with over 500 attendees across the UK. If you have not come across his work, it is worth looking up.
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