Think about the last financial plan you worked on for a couple.

Who led the conversation? Whose risk profile shaped the recommendations? And if one partner wasn’t at the meeting – or didn’t really engage when they were – how much of a difference did that make to the plan you produced?

If you’re not sure, that might be the point.

As paraplanners, we work with the information we’re given. But some of the most consequential decisions in financial planning – which pension gets the contributions, how retirement income is structured, what happens when one partner dies – can be based on assumptions that nobody has explicitly questioned. And more often than not, it’s women who are most exposed when those assumptions go unexamined.

This Assembly is a chance to look at three of those assumptions directly: where they come from, what they cost clients, and what paraplanners can do about them.

Three recurring assumptions that could be impacting women’s financial future

We’ve chosen three assumptions that come up again and again in financial planning for couples, and that can have a disproportionate impact on women’s financial outcomes. 

They span different life stages, so wherever your clients are in their financial journey, there’s likely to be something that resonates.

For each one, we explored how it shows up in real planning situations, what can go wrong for clients, and what the risks are – before asking the practical question: what can a paraplanner actually do about it?

Host Sam Tonks was joined by Women’s Wealth founder, Sam Secomb, and Susan Hope, Business Development Director at Scottish Widows.

Together they worked through each assumption, shared practical ideas, and had a (very) honest conversation about how paraplanners can raise these issues with planners in a way that gets heard.

During this Assembly Sam T, Sam S and Susan covered:

• How planning assumptions form in practice – and why the ones nobody questions are often the ones that cause the most damage
• The compliance and consumer duty implications when planning has only really engaged one partner in a couple
• What can go wrong for clients at different life stages when assumptions go unexamined – and what it costs them
• The risks for the business, and how to demonstrate on the file that you’ve done the right thing
• How to raise these issues with a planner in a way that comes across as risk mitigation, not criticism
• Practical things you can put in place – in the file, in your processes, and in your conversations – that make a real difference

Useful links

Here are links, articles and further reading mentioned during this Assembly.

CPD: Request your certificate

Watch the replay at Crowdcast (with chat)

Sam Secomb’s Telegraph article

Hers and His: Opening up the family budget from the Fawcett Society

Women and Wealth: Building Better Advice Relationships

Women in Retirement insights from Scottish Widows

Be Money Well resources

Living with and beyond cancer in 2045

Financial abuse: does it concern you?

How paraplanners can transform women's financial futures

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