Episode 29 : Financial Planning When Your Child Has Special Needs

Michael Avery: There are moments in life that really don’t come with any kind of financial planning checklist. You become a parent and imagine a future for your child: school, university, perhaps a career, relationships, marriage and independence, all of those things bundled together. And then life hands you a completely different chapter.

Bryony Gilmour and her husband, Gareth, only discovered when their daughter, Jade, was born that she had Down syndrome. Understandably, financial planning was not what occupied their minds at the time. I’m sure there were countless appointments, therapies, learning and adjusting, and above all, simply helping their daughter thrive initially.

Years later, Bryony would qualify as a financial planner herself at the age of 46 and begin looking back at her family’s experience through a very different lens. Because raising a child who may need lifelong support eventually raises one of the most difficult questions that any parent can contemplate: what financial, legal and family decisions need to be in place if I am no longer here to look after them?

It’s a very difficult conversation. This is Life Chapters, Money Choices. It’s a very important conversation. I’m Michael Avery, as always joined by Kim Potgieter. Bryony, thank you so much for trusting us with what I know is a deeply personal story. Welcome to the podcast.

Bryony Gilmour: Thanks, Michael.

Michael Avery: Before we get anywhere near financial planning, take us back to when Jade was born. You and Gareth, I believe, didn’t know during the pregnancy that she had Down syndrome. What do you remember about those first few hours and days?

Bryony Gilmour: I was at work and I was going for my regular check-up. I think I was 35 weeks pregnant. When we got there, the doctor said there wasn’t blood going through the umbilical cord and it would be an emergency Caesar. So there was no time to go home and fetch the bag. We went straight in and had the Caesar, which we did. I don’t remember much more after that. We were in the delivery room, and the paediatrician literally gave Jade back to us and said, “Here’s your baby. I think she has Down syndrome.” That was the sentence. That was our news. Apparently, from what the family told me afterwards, the time it took for someone to come out of the delivery room to tell the family that we were all fine was hours. I think it was more that the doctor was with us, trying to process it, because he had obviously not picked it up, so he was as shocked as we were. It was just a process of being together and trying to decide what name we would call her, because we had a list of names. Then she was taken straight to ICU. She was premature. She was only 1.8 kilograms. So they took her straight into ICU, and that was our next four weeks.

Michael Avery: Neonatal ICUs can be intimidating. I’ve been in a few of them, where the patches are almost the size of your child.

Bryony Gilmour: With our first child, I had literally fallen pregnant within six weeks, so it was all very exciting. With our second child, it had taken two and a half years, so we weren’t sure what was happening. All the tests came back fine. I was only 31 at the time, so I was young and wasn’t seen as a high-risk case. All the blood tests had actually been better than they had been for Kerry. So there were no signs and nothing was picked up. I was with a great gynaecologist who had done all the scans as we went, but nothing was found, which brings us back to the fact that medicine is not a perfect science.

Michael Avery: Well, one thing we’ve learnt through this podcast, Kim, is that life isn’t a perfect science. You have an idea. You think you’re going to go from one chapter of life, one phase of life, to the next, and then you’re hit with something that is probably one of the biggest curveballs you’ve got to deal with. You’ve had other clients as well who have been given similar news and similar stories.

Kim Potgieter: I even think back to myself. When I was pregnant with my third child, like Bryony, I didn’t have any clue that there was anything wrong with my baby, because sometimes when you go in, they don’t pick things up on scans. My baby was born with half a heart at full term, and I lost her. So I can relate to that shock of that news. I share that because, for all of us and for people listening to our podcast, life happens. There are many unexpected things that happen in our lives. It brings me to something I was sharing in a workshop this morning with a group of people. We were talking about midlife and I shared this exercise called the timeline. I was doing the timeline with them and showing them that when you are in midlife, you have had a whole lot of transitions that have happened, but there is also a whole lot more coming. The reason you look at your timeline is to look at some of the areas where things maybe haven’t gone according to schedule, or exactly how you planned, or how you thought they were going to be. It also shows you the strength you have inside you. When these things happen to us, it is hard to see at the time, but we really have to go in and find that grit, and we come out stronger, deeper and with more wisdom. I think, for all of us, having had years of life, it is realising that this is part of what has made us who we are today. So, yes, I have experienced it personally, and we experience it all the time with clients, but at the same time, the gift that comes from these learnings and different experiences, when I share with clients, is huge.

Michael Avery: Going back to those early days, Bryony, was there a period of grieving an expected future and timeline that you’d already constructed in your own mind? And how did you deal with that?

Bryony Gilmour: We did go to lots of therapy, and I think that was one of the things they really told us to do. What’s quite hard when something like this happens is that you grieve all the losses of what you expect a typical child to have, which is so wrong in the sense that when our first child was born, we weren’t planning her wedding, where she was going to go to varsity or what she was going to do. We were just doing today. So we had to do a lot of work on living in just today, which Gareth and I have done a lot of together, which has been fantastic. We’ve been very lucky in that we come from a very supportive extended family, with cousins and people around us. They helped us a lot in the beginning, getting through all of that. Gareth is a very grounded person, and I always call him the anchor. He has remembered to bring us back to the fact that we can only do today. We can do today, and we can do this week, and we can plan for that. Similarly, when we talk about something and say, “Well, what’s going to happen with Jade?” he will say, “Okay, great, so what’s going to happen with Kerry then?” And I’ll say, “Okay, I get the point.” We come back to, let’s just do this next chapter. From a financial planning point of view, maybe that hasn’t been as incredible because we might have thought about some other things, but it has got us through and given us the strength to get to where we are today, which has been phenomenal.

Michael Avery: There is that tension, though. To your point, Kim, often when we talk, it’s about planning. It’s about trying to foresee, or at least lay the groundwork for, a future that we foresee today. But in an environment like this, that is very difficult to do. So how do you start to marry the kind of long-term framework we try to encourage with the ability to realise that sometimes you’ve just got to live in the moment, given the situation?

Kim Potgieter: I agree that we live in the moment, given the situation, but at the same time I think you can complement it with planning. Many times, when we work with clients who have a child they are going to need to take care of for the rest of their lives, the planning is different. The way we structure it is to look at the younger person in the relationship’s age 100. In this kind of situation, we would say, “Okay, Bryony, let’s look at your planning to Jade’s age 100.” I know it is scary, because it changes that whole timeline. I’ve seen with parents that when we have these discussions, they are really hard to have. But once we’ve had them, there is one less thing for them to worry about. Because, Michael, if they don’t have the discussion, I hear what Bryony is saying and what Gareth has said about living for today. Yes, but that will be in the back of your mind, worrying you all the time. What if something happens to us? What if something happens to both of us? Who is going to look after Jade? That is why I say the two should work alongside each other. By complementing it with this plan, you can say, “Well, if we are not around, this is what it would look like. This is what we would want to have.” So for me, I think you can do both.

Michael Avery: You only became a financial planner 14 or 15 years after Jade was born.

Bryony Gilmour: Yes, 16 years. A friend of mine encouraged me to get on and do something else. She always said that I needed to. There was a growth area in that, so I went and studied financial planning. And yes, it has been a huge learning curve. It has been very exciting, and it has been a great space to be in.

Michael Avery: And Bryony is an incredible financial planner and absolutely living proof that we can make these midlife pivots in career, in finding new things and new purpose, which I think is fantastic as well. Does it give you a different lens through which to reflect now on the decisions that you made in the prior 15 years? What were the big learnings for you from that?

Bryony Gilmour: From having a child with special needs, I think the biggest one has been estate planning, which has been a great thing to actually start looking further down the road than just now. I think a lot of us think, “Do we have enough money to live now?” but not, “What is going to happen then?” So I think we have done a lot of that. We have done a lot of trust work and ensured that Jade is safe from that aspect. That has been big. I think the tax work is another big one. There are tax rebates for people who have children with special needs. It is a bit of a pain, and you do have to fill in lots of forms. But once you have that in play, there are advantages and ways that you can structure things to better suit your family.

Michael Avery: Oh, I was not even aware of that.

Bryony Gilmour: Yes. You get great medical aid credits, which is also helpful because you spend a lot of time at doctors, so it is a nice one to get. You get benefits from a medical aid point of view. Those are huge. School is another one. There is a sort of gap in the market for schools and what you can get out of that. So I think planning gives you a bit of a process as to what the next chapter would be and where she will ultimately go. I think a big one is responsibility. Having two children, you want to make sure that your planning is different in the sense that you are probably planning financially more for one child, but it is to offer the other one freedom and choice. You need to make sure that you have planned so that there is a direction and she knows what your wishes are, so that you don’t leave your one child with responsibility.

Michael Avery: Tell us about Jade, because I think often the problem with these things is that we see a label or a diagnosis, but there is a person, there is a human being behind that. Is there anything that infuriates you as a mother?

Bryony Gilmour: A lot infuriates me, but I think that is with all children. When you have a child with special needs, you don’t have a child with special needs, you have your child. So I don’t see it a lot. People will say, “Wow, you’re very patient.” My worst was that probably until she was 16, she woke up every morning at two o’clock and needed to see me. So I’m really pleased we’re past that now. For the last three years, she has slept through the night. Little things like that. But she’s just a lovely child, and she is the most empathetic child, which is quite incredible. She’s very proud of me for going to get a job. She thinks I’m very clever, and I’m definitely the best financial planner in the world, so we don’t have to worry about that.

Michael Avery: There we go. Come and speak to Bryony, because that’s probably the best endorsement you’re going to get as a CFP out there. But I guess there is a fear that when you initially sit down, you think, “What is this going to subtract from our life?” rather than looking at it and saying, “What is it going to add as well?” And how can we ensure that we leave enough behind for Jade so that she has those options? Often financial planning is exactly about that. It’s about giving yourself and your children options in the broadest sense. What have been the challenges, though? What have been the difficulties in developing this plan and starting to think beyond just saying, “Okay, after varsity, she’s on her own”?

Bryony Gilmour: Yes, I think that has been the hardest part. We met with a speech therapist years ago who said that you always have to lead her in the direction of where you are going next, from a Jade point of view. It is quite hard because I think she has got to a point where she might not intellectually grow more than where she is at the moment, and she is still a little bit of a child, so it is very difficult to remove the parent. What is the next step in her life? What should it be? And how do we encourage her to go along that path without feeling like you are walking out on your child? She is still little, so how can I protect her when she is actually 19 and has choices? She has told us she is going to varsity in Pretoria and she is leaving home, so Dad and I should get used to it. She does want more, but you are very protective, so it is hard to divide that between what should be, if there is a should, and what you are prepared to do.

Michael Avery: Yes, and Kim, bringing it back to the way you like to approach things, it is about being able to open that door, should it arrive. I am sure it comes with all of these additional expenses: doctors, therapists, speech therapists, maybe schools for children with special needs, that kind of thing. It does create much more pressure internally on that financial plan. How does one overcome that?

Kim Potgieter: I’m not sure how you overcome it, because it is a reality. But I know we have a number of clients who have adult children they need to look after because they are children with special needs. What many of them have done is found different places for them to live. There are establishments or homes where they can go, where they are provided for, do work, live and learn, and are in a place where they feel comfortable with it all. Obviously, they can come home on weekends and for the holidays. But what that does is it gives the child some of that independence, which I think is so hard for any parent to let go of because they are thinking, “My child needs me.” Part of that is also the independence of knowing that if anything had to happen to me, you would be all right in the world. So I have sat with many couples where it has been a quandary: should we or shouldn’t we bring something like that in for our daughter or our son, where they are going to live somewhere else, not with us? It is a big decision, and such an individual one. Like all of our planning, it is completely individual to the person, how they would want to be involved and whether it is something they would be open to. A lot of times these places are in need of financial support, if I can put it that way. Bryony and I were in a meeting with a client yesterday whose daughter is in her late 40s, and part of his whole planning is to give money to this home so that they can keep running, because it is hard from a funding point of view. They do not get funding, so it is not as if this funding just happens. I think, Michael, if I could say it, it becomes a central part of your life. I do not think it is something where you can say, “I am going to compartmentalise this.” This is part of your life. Most of the clients we work with are fundraising for different places to help where their children are. They are always thinking about the future and what it is going to look like. So the planning is different. But maybe my final thing to share there is that I always say, let’s have an “and”. There is that, and there is your other life, and there are your other children.

Michael Avery: That must be quite difficult to do, to allow yourself the permission to say, “Actually, I still have my own life that I am planning for.”

Bryony Gilmour: I think that was one of the key pieces of work in the very beginning. I spent quite a lot of time with psychologists, and it was to divide yourself from it. So it is important to remember that I am Bryony and Jade is Jade with a disability. I do not have the disability. It is to try to separate it, so I can assist her, help her and help her flourish, but there is a separateness between us. Going back to your planning, I think one of the things I have really learnt is to give yourself choices. I do not have to send her to a home if I do not want to, but I need to know that I have planned so that it can happen if it needs to happen. It is to give yourself the choice along the way, and that is huge.

Michael Avery: I’m having that conversation with my soon-to-be 12-year-old at the moment about the importance of studying and giving yourself academic choices when it comes to not knowing what you want to do. I said, “You’ve got to give yourself choices. You’ve got to put in the effort. You’ve got to cultivate the discipline and flex the muscle, so you have those choices open to you.” I think financial planning is very similar. We don’t have crystal balls. We don’t know what’s going to happen five, 10 or 15 years from now, or what decisions we may take, but you don’t want those doors closed then because you haven’t started planning now.

Bryony Gilmour: No, and I think from an insurance point of view, back to your conversation with Glenn, it is the same kind of thing. It is to realise that maybe, for me, insurance means something different compared to somebody else. I don’t have the financial means at the moment to leave fortunes of money for Jade, but I can have insurance to protect her should something happen to me, and to protect Kerry. So there are lots of options, and it is about exploring those options and finding out how you can protect yourself and your family going forward.

Kim Potgieter: And then, Bryony, on that point, it is adding a trust to it. We have many discussions around which kind of trust it should be, because we can have a trust called a special trust. What a special trust does is give a different tax rate that is only meant for that person, so it cannot be left to anybody else. You can either work with a special trust, or you can work with a normal inter vivos trust and have both your children as beneficiaries, but receiving money in a different way. Again, it is what works for the family. For one family who does not have somebody else who could maybe look after things, if we look at Bryony, for instance, she has Kerry, her daughter, who would be there and could work with a special trust. But some families do not have anybody else. Their other children have emigrated, they live overseas, and if something happens to the parents, they do not want to send their child overseas because it is going to be too much disruption and too much change. That is when the special trust can really come in and work. So, again, from a personal point of view, we look in and see what is going to work best for this family.

Michael Avery: I was going to ask you to build on that. The question of guardianship also comes into play. There are the financial needs, but there is also the question of who is actually going to look after them.

Bryony Gilmour: Yes. As I said in the beginning, we are very fortunate. We come from a very close-knit family on both sides. Gareth and I both have siblings who live within a kilometre of our house, and our parents have both been very involved, as have cousins. Jade’s best friends have always been her cousins. She has never had a birthday party where there weren’t 20 people, and they are her 20 cousins who arrive and make everything special. So we have been very fortunate in that. We are lucky, and we are fortunate that they can afford to support her, should it be necessary, and they would take her in. That was hard in the beginning with sisters and brothers when she was much younger. Now that she is older, she very much has an opinion, so she would decide what she wanted to do. And Kerry, we are fortunate, is an incredible child. She is very empathetic, and as she says, she does not want her sister very far away from her. So currently, yes.

Michael Avery: But not everyone is as lucky as you are, though, and often you’ve got to think about these things in the way that you are now structuring this longer-term financial plan. What are some of the blind spots you sometimes encounter, Kim, when you sit down with families who have children with special needs that they have to incorporate into the estate planning, and when they’re thinking long term about trusts, guardianships and all of those complexities?

Kim Potgieter: I think the blind spots often happen, first of all, in being brave enough to have the conversation, because we do, as people, tend to want to put our heads in the sand and not deal with it. So the first blind spot is to have the conversation. Another blind spot often, and I don’t mean this for Bryony or for Kerry, but from other experience I’ve had, is that the sibling isn’t always willing, able or open to being that surrogate mother or the surrogate person who is going to look after the finances, or dad, because we see it from both sides. So the blind spot is always having an alternative. We always go, this is alternative one. What is alternative two? That can often cause a blind spot. A third one is when we start talking about using a trustee, where this is their job and this is what they do, and they will look after the finances and everything, because then there is a cost involved, and then there is not a person there. Often we do close down to that because we don’t want that. We want it to be the whole family thing. So I always like to have alternatives for everything. We have a plan and we have an alternative, and if we’ve done that, then I feel that we can’t do much more. That is the planning done. Then we must get on with the living and, as Bryony is saying, enjoy what they have as a family together. We can’t always be thinking about when we’re not around, but we need to get that in place just to be able to live.

Bryony Gilmour: Yes, and setting up the trust gives you that freedom of taking that responsibility away from your other child. So you have a structure, and she has a choice whether she wants to be involved or not, and also her life. Her life might be here at the moment, but it might be overseas in five years’ time, and she needs to have the comfort that we have thought further than that. We have brought her into a lot of those conversations, so she has been part of it with us and able to make those decisions together. We remind her that, at 22, you don’t know where your life is going. So this is part of a big family decision. I mean, she has probably, at 22, experienced quite a lot of emotional upheaval all by herself, but she has been part of it. She has always been part of those decisions with us. She is one of the trustees because she will be part of Jade’s life, but she does not have to take the responsibility. She can be part of the responsibility, but it is not hers to own.

Michael Avery: Yes, and I think there is great insight in including your children in these conversations as early as possible. Was there a particular age when you felt it was appropriate to start having these conversations?

Bryony Gilmour: Since I’ve been a financial planner, I have brought her in much more than I had before. Before that, she had sort of been on the periphery. But now she is much more involved in those decisions, questions and conversations, because I think it is hard. Your letter of wishes is to tell people what you really want. But if she understands what our true wish is for her and how we want it to be, I don’t ever want it to be her burden. It must be her choice.

Michael Avery: And in terms of including Jade in the planning as well, is that trickier?

Bryony Gilmour: That’s trickier, yes. Unfortunately, Gareth’s dad passed away two years ago, and Jade will harp on things for a very long time. So for her, death is a very scary topic at the moment, and still, two years later, she does know. She will say to me, even as recently as last night, “One day when you’re not here, Mum, this is what’s going to happen.” So we do try to bring it into the conversation so she is aware that everybody is going to pass away at some point, and we don’t know when that is. But to another degree, I wouldn’t put it in, because she will become obsessed with it and ask us about it at least five times a day, every day, for the next three years. So we do choose our stories.

Michael Avery: Yes, but again, that’s why there is no one-size-fits-all approach to this. You have to understand your child’s needs, how they react to certain information and concepts, and how much you can bring them into the planning versus how much you need to bring other family members into the planning as well. But you have to plan. You have to give yourself options. I know a few people who have avoided this, sadly, and taken a bit of a different approach. I think there is a lot of debt that accumulates in that position, and they are only now starting to approach it, but very late in the game. What would your advice be, Kim, if someone has not really started thinking methodically through a plan about how they can start catching up?

Kim Potgieter: I always like to say it is never too late. When I meet with people, even when they have not saved for retirement, we can have a completely different discussion. You say, “Well, because I have not started, should I never start?” And you do need to start. We break it up into small chunks of how we do the planning process to get there. Another thing we often see, and we are talking now about Bryony’s daughter, is that with other clients, it may be a sibling or somebody else in their family they need to look after. When they first come in and see us for the plan, they do not always mention the person. Then, over time, they say, “Well, I have this person I need to look after, and I have this responsibility.” So put those planning pieces in. Bryony mentioned one thing: there is life insurance. But always make sure that the money is going directly to them for what they need. If there is somebody in the family you look after, you can leave the life insurance policy in a trust, or a special trust, that would then look after them. Then, to Bryony’s point, you are not putting the burden on the rest of the family, because that is something you have undertaken to do.

Michael Avery: And when it comes to the life insurance conversation, if you are taking it out after the fact, is it hugely expensive? Is there a penalty or risk premium added to that, Bryony, generally?

Bryony Gilmour: Well, it is always on you. When I take out a life insurance policy on myself, for instance, it will depend on my age. So the difficulty is, if you are only waking up at 60 and now you need to get life insurance on yourself, it is impossible. It is far too expensive. So you would have needed to do something like that much earlier. It has nothing to do with the person you are leaving it to. It has everything to do with you.

Michael Avery: So there is no see-through risk, is what I am trying to get to.

Kim Potgieter: No see-through. The risk would be in the person who is taking out the policy. Remember, the actuaries are doing the tables and working out what the chances are and how long I am going to be around. So, yes, if you have left it too late, Michael, and you are only having these conversations when you are much older, life insurance actually is not one of the options. So you need to look at how you structure it differently. The earlier, the better. For those people you say might not have thought of it, the earlier they put that life insurance in place, that is one less thing they would have to worry about.

Bryony Gilmour: Yes, and I think, ultimately, we look at the fact that once you have saved for your retirement, you possibly do not need life insurance for you personally. Maybe in my scenario, it is not something that would be an option to give up.

Kim Potgieter: Yes.

Bryony Gilmour: Because it would be preparing for my retirement, but also ensuring that when I am not here, there is something for Jade.

Kim Potgieter: Well, that is why, when I started and we spoke about the planning, we would plan to Jade’s age 100. When you are in your 40s, like Bryony is, and we are sitting there saying, “No, we need to add another 80-odd years,” it is a little scary. You must see the numbers too. So, number one thing, Bryony is going to be a financial planner for a very long time.

Michael Avery: It does change the equation and the maths a little bit about tax-free savings and investment vehicles. If you can compound that over another 50-odd years, if you started putting it away from day one, those are fantastic products.

Kim Potgieter: Yes, when you look at them now and you hear all those lovely Instagram clips about how much money could possibly be there at some point. If your child was born with special needs and you opened one for them immediately, the compounding effect could be huge for their retirement, or for that next plan.

Michael Avery: Bryony, I’d like to just come back to you, not Bryony the financial planner or Bryony the mother, just Bryony. You said that becoming a financial planner later in life involved recognising that being Jade’s mother is a central part of who you are, but it isn’t all of who you are. So what did reclaiming that part of yourself do for you?

Bryony Gilmour: It was the most empowering thing that I’ve done. It’s been an incredible experience. Being Jade’s mum, I was very fortunate because I worked with my husband, so I worked from home. That was a great opportunity to be part of her life, her everyday doctor’s visits and everything. But as she has got older, she has become more independent, and it has given me purpose back for being more, which I think a lot of women later on in life do. We dive in and give our children everything of ourselves, and then suddenly go, “Oh, what about me?” And that is what studying, going back to studying, did. Thank goodness my daughter was writing matric at the same time, Kerry. So she really got me to that table and got me studying. But then it has been incredible to realise what I still have, and that has been huge. It has been great. And then being a financial planner, which is helping people, has been huge because you can look at things. I have had experiences, and as I said earlier, everyone has a story. That is the most incredible thing about being a financial planner: no two stories are the same. Everybody has something.

Michael Avery: Maybe something I just want to add to that, obviously a very good financial planner, because that is what financial planning, to me, is all about: getting to connect with people and their stories. No two stories are exactly the same. People don’t want the same things, and we’ve had far too many of the insurance salesman type people who go and sell you a product, don’t even care about your story, and say, “We’ll see you in 12 months’ time.” That is not financial planning, people, so just a sidebar. If everyone treats you like Bryony, then you know you’ve got a good financial planner. Sorry, Kim, I’ll get off my soapbox now.

Kim Potgieter: No, no, no. Good point. What I just wanted to add to it was that Bryony has had the right attitude about a midlife recalibration. I still remember when she came in to Chartered in the beginning. She was working alongside other 24-year-olds who had just come out of university. She came in, having just qualified with a postgraduate qualification, and she was working towards being a certified financial planner. So she was with her colleagues who were now 24. Her attitude was phenomenal. I share this because of other people in midlife who might want to make a change in careers. They now want to do this change in careers, but in their heads, if they think that they are going to need to come down a level, because you do. You are coming down. There she was, running the business with her husband. Now all of a sudden, she was working fixed work hours, doing it a certain way and learning a certain way. She was part of an article planner programme, but her attitude was phenomenal. And to see the growth, because she was prepared to have that right kind of growth mindset. She came in, she learnt what she had to learn. Her progress is obviously exponential because she has all of this wisdom, this life experience and the right attitude to work with clients. But she had to have that right attitude to be able to work alongside 24-year-olds, to be able to be their mum and treat each other as colleagues, and try to keep up with the Instagram lingo of the day.

Bryony Gilmour: Yes, and be cool with it. I still battle.

Michael Avery: I’m not low-key with the lingo of that generation just yet. I have enough of it around me, though.

Bryony Gilmour: I was fortunate to have a 22-year-old, or to have a 19- to 23-year-old, so I could go home and quickly message and say, “Kerry, help me here, Mum’s battling.”

Kim Potgieter: But yes, many people who want to change careers are not prepared to make all of those sacrifices because of what they need to do to get where they have to go. And with us now working, and I mean now we’re hearing Bryony is going to work way past 70 because she needs to.

Kim Potgieter: Sorry, Bryony.

Kim Potgieter: No, but with us now working, let’s say until we are 70, often we want to make a change in careers. We do not want to do the same thing. Here Bryony is in her 40s, and she has this opportunity where she has had a whole second career because she has been brave enough to do this. I do sit with many people and we are having that discussion about them changing careers, but then when it comes down to it, that’s too hard. That’s not how I want it to look. So, yes, it is a lot about what you are prepared to give up for what you want to get long term. She obviously had a bigger picture of what she wanted to get long term, so she was prepared to make the sacrifices to get there.

Michael Avery: Yes, well, chapeau and a tip of the cap to you because I’m a few years behind, but I’m turning 46 this year, and to think about going back and studying again and doing all of that sounds interesting, but hugely daunting. I don’t know if I’d be able to do it. So to show that internal attitude, resolve, grit and courage to get through it, I think it’s just phenomenal.

Bryony Gilmour: I think that the rewards come so quickly. You are rewarded so quickly for what you’ve done that it just gets that ball rolling. And once it gets rolling and you realise what you can do, it’s amazing.

Michael Avery: Momentum is a wonderful thing in investing as well. Well, Bryony Gilmour, thank you very much. Mother to Kerry and Jade, wife to Gareth, and after beginning a new chapter of your own at 46, a financial planner at Chartered Wealth. Really great lessons, huge insight, emotion and courage in talking about your own life and raising a child with special needs. It sounds like Jade is fantastic, and she is very, very lucky to have you and that extended family around her. I think the big take-home for me is that you can’t plan away every uncertainty at the end of the day, but you can make sure that the people you love are not left to face those uncertainties entirely on their own. So thank you very much, and to you as well, Kim, as always, thank you. And that’s where we’ll leave this episode of Life Chapters, Money Choices. From me, Michael Avery, thanks so much for tuning in. Don’t forget to like, subscribe and share among your network. We really are enjoying putting the series together and bringing you these important conversations.