How it works
Four stages, and what each one produces
Planning goes wrong when it turns into a meeting with no output. Every stage here produces something you keep, and you can see the whole shape before you start.
Planning goes wrong when it turns into a meeting with no output. Every stage here produces something you keep, and you can see the whole shape before you start.
The first two stages are free. The modelling and the decisions are the paid work, and they are one product at one price.
Everything starts with what is actually happening, not what you think is happening. Connect your bank read-only and the last few months sort themselves into income, committed costs, living costs and what is genuinely left. Nearly everybody is wrong about that last number, usually by a wide margin — and a plan built on the wrong one fails quietly about eighteen months later for reasons nobody can identify.
What you want the money to do, turned into things that can be modelled. “Retire comfortably” cannot be. “Stop full-time work at 61 on £3,200 a month after tax, with the mortgage gone” can be, and the difference between those two sentences is most of the value. This is also where we find out what isn't negotiable.
Your money run forward every year to age 100 with UK tax applied properly at each step — income tax including the Scottish bands, National Insurance, dividends, capital gains, pension allowances and inheritance tax on what's left. Then the same plan run two thousand more times with the good and bad years shuffled, because a plan that only survives one lucky run isn't a plan. Then we break it on purpose.
The part that makes the rest worth doing. We go through what the numbers are telling you — and each point ends in a question rather than an instruction, because they're your decisions and some aren't really about money at all. Then a short list of specific actions for the next ninety days, with dates. Not twenty things. The four or five that move the answer.
This can happen at any stage. Financial planning is not regulated financial advice: nobody here will tell you which pension, fund, lender or policy to choose, and Buzz Money Ltd is not authorised to. When a decision genuinely needs that, we say so and can introduce you to Equity & General, authorised and regulated by the FCA (No. 474163). Your plan travels with you, so you arrive with the work done rather than starting from a blank form. Optional, no obligation, and if you become their client E&G pay Buzz a commission, disclosed beforehand.
Usually two to three weeks end to end, most of which is us doing the modelling rather than you doing anything. The Healthcheck is two minutes, the destination conversation is about an hour, and then you get the document and a session to go through it.
No, but the plan is better if you do, and cheaper for us to build — which is part of why it is £399 rather than four figures. If you'd rather not, we can work from figures you give us. Just know that most people's remembered spending is optimistic, and the plan inherits that.
Then it's doing its job. A projection that says you're four years short is worth far more than one that says you're fine, because there's still time to do something about it. Every assumption is printed, so you can push back on any of them and we'll re-run it.
No. The Plan is a complete piece of work and plenty of people take it and go. The monthly service exists because life moves — a sale, an inheritance, a change of mind about when to stop — and a plan nobody revisits slowly stops being true. Start it later if you'd rather.
A planner, using our own modelling engine rather than a third-party calculator. It's tested against known UK tax cases and it produces the same answer twice — which matters when the document promises that every assumption is printed.