Sarah Holmes

Hello everyone, my name is Sarah Holmes. I’ve been a client of Metis Wealth and its predecessor firms for more than 20 years and have been working with George Delaney during that time.

I was always asking myself the question as to how you were going to plan for retirement, savings, getting rid of the mortgage. Thinking about things like critical illness, life cover, all those sorts of things, which are important aspects of financial planning, but I just never had any time to think about it, I was working full-time. I still am working full-time, but in a career in law, which demands very long working hours, and that together with childcare, and everything else going on in my life meant that financial planning always fell to the bottom of the to-do list.

What I liked particularly about working with George was that he helped me find the time to be able to look at this properly and develop a longer-term strategic plan.

What I really liked about George was that he stayed in touch with me and there were long periods of time when I didn’t necessarily have a large amount that I could put aside for savings. But he assiduously kept in touch with me every six months or so, just to catch up, showing interest in the family, and he’s always very interested in what my overall life objectives were. I found this to be very different from other financial advisers.

The most recent thing that George has helped me with is retirement planning and we have been looking at this now for some time.

Now that I am very close to retirement, it’s a very big step. When you’re changing from a 40-year career, where you’ve been earning throughout to suddenly become dependent on your accumulated savings. George has been doing forward projections for me to show me how to budget in the future and testing those projections to make sure that I have enough to retire on. This gives me a tremendous amount of reassurance.

He has been hugely thoughtful, in terms of helping me simplify some of my financial affairs to try and make it a lot more transparent than it was before. I think going forward, I feel very optimistic that during retirement, I’ll be able to manage. I know how I’m going to do it. I’ve got a very clear plan, that he has provided me with. So, I feel very comforted by all of that going forward.

The three words that I would use to describe Metis are thoughtful, professional, and knowledgeable.

I think the best thing about working with Metis is that they have been with me for more than 20 years. So, they’ve stayed with me through this journey of financial planning. And financial planning is one where one has a lot of short-term pressures. But actually, one needs to be thinking about the longer term and that has been the best thing. It’s been this long-term relationship.

I have said to George many times that I don’t think I would be in the position that I am now had it not been for his patience and consistency over many years.

Yes, I would recommend Metis. I think for people in my situation, who have a lot of financial pressure, very busy lives in their mid-40s and don’t get enough time to really think about financial planning. I think Metis have really been excellent in terms of staying with me right the way through life’s journey where there’s been a lot of financial change during that period.