What might the future require of me — and what forms of wealth will help me meet it?
Most financial plans make forecasts.
They forecast your pension.
Your investments.
Your income.
Your expenditure.
Inflation.
Investment returns.
Perhaps your life expectancy.
Then they project those numbers twenty, thirty or forty years into the future.
But there is a strange omission.
What world are those numbers being projected into?
Because your future financial life cannot be separated from the future world in which you will live.
We forecast the money. Then quietly freeze the world.
Imagine someone is 60 today and planning to live until 90.
A financial planner might model the next thirty years with extraordinary numerical precision.
They may assume investment returns of X%.
Inflation of Y%.
Spending rising at Z%.
They may model tax, pensions, withdrawals and different investment portfolios.
The spreadsheet moves forwards year by year.
But behind it sits a much larger assumption:
that the world in which those numbers will operate remains sufficiently similar to the world we know today.
That assumption is rarely discussed.
Yet it may be one of the most important assumptions in the entire plan.
Think about the difference between the world of 1996 and the world of 2026.
The internet.
Smartphones.
Social media.
China’s economic transformation.
The global financial crisis.
A pandemic.
Brexit.
Artificial intelligence.
Changing employment.
Changing housing markets.
Changing energy systems.
Changing geopolitics.
Now imagine pretending in 1996 that none of those things mattered to a thirty-year financial plan.
That is roughly what we risk doing today when we project money into 2056 without thinking seriously about the world of 2056.
You don’t retire into a spreadsheet
You retire into a society.
Into an economy.
Into a climate.
Into a healthcare system.
Into a housing market.
Into an energy system.
Into communities and families.
Into technologies that may not yet exist.
Into political and economic institutions that may look very different from today’s.
Financial capital is called upon inside that world.
So the question is not simply:
Will my money last?
It is also:
What might my money need to do?
Those are very different questions.
A retirement plan based on cheap energy, readily available insurance, stable food prices, predictable taxation, affordable healthcare and peaceful global trade may look very different from one operating under different conditions.
We cannot know exactly what will happen.
But uncertainty is not a reason to ignore the world.
It is a reason to plan for resilience.
Climate is part of this. But it isn’t the whole of it.
Climate change is perhaps the clearest example.
A degree on a global temperature chart can sound abstract.
Its consequences are not.
Climate can affect food production, migration, insurance, infrastructure, energy costs, housing, supply chains, government spending and ultimately investment markets.
But future-world planning should not become another name for climate planning.
There are many other forces.
Global demographics are changing.
The populations of different regions of the world will grow at very different rates.
Economic and political power may shift with them.
Artificial intelligence could transform the nature of work, productivity and the value of different human skills.
Healthcare and longevity may change.
Governments may become more indebted.
Tax systems may evolve.
Communities may become stronger or weaker.
Human agency may increase as technology gives people greater access to knowledge and capability — or diminish if power becomes increasingly concentrated in institutions and platforms.
Any one forecast may be wrong.
The point is not prediction.
The point is to stop pretending that the status quo is the neutral assumption.
It isn’t.
This changes what we mean by diversification
Traditional financial planning talks a great deal about diversification.
Don’t put everything into one company.
One sector.
One country.
One asset class.
Good advice.
But there is a much larger concentration risk that receives far less attention.
What if your future depends almost entirely upon financial capital?
A pension pot can be diversified across thousands of securities while your life remains remarkably concentrated.
Your financial assets may still depend upon functioning markets, stable institutions, economic growth and a world sufficiently similar to the one assumed by the models used to forecast them.
That is why Total Wealth matters.
Your wealth is not merely your investment portfolio.
It also includes your ability to earn.
Your skills.
Your health and capability.
Your home.
Your relationships.
Your family.
Your community.
Your adaptability.
Your knowledge.
Your time.
And something financial planning rarely treats as an asset at all:
your ability to need less.
Real resilience comes not merely from diversifying the assets inside the portfolio.
It comes from diversifying the things your future depends upon.
Your house is not just a valuation
Consider someone’s home.
A conventional financial plan may record:
Property value: £500,000.
But the future-world questions are different.
Where is it?
What might happen to insurance costs?
How energy efficient is it?
How expensive will it be to heat or cool?
Is it suitable for an older person?
Does it provide access to family, healthcare and community?
Could its location become more or less desirable?
Does it provide resilience — or simply represent a large number on a balance sheet?
The financial value matters.
But so does the function the asset performs in the future world.
The same applies to human capital.
A 60-year-old may have enormous remaining earning capacity.
But what skills will the economy value at 65?
Could AI increase that person’s productivity?
Could flexible working allow them to continue contributing for longer while working fewer hours?
Perhaps the best retirement plan does not involve maximising a pension pot and then abruptly stopping work.
Perhaps it involves redesigning human capital.
Again, you cannot see that if financial capital is the only thing inside the frame.
Financial planning needs scenarios for the world, not just scenarios for the portfolio
Financial planners routinely model:
What if markets fall 20%?
What if inflation is 4% rather than 2%?
What if you live to 100?
Useful questions.
But we might also ask:
What if energy becomes substantially more expensive?
What if artificial intelligence dramatically changes your profession?
What if property insurance becomes difficult in some locations?
What if the tax burden rises?
What if healthcare becomes more expensive?
What if your children live on another continent?
What if working into your seventies becomes both normal and desirable?
What if economic growth is structurally lower?
What if it is much higher because technology creates enormous productivity gains?
What if communities become more important sources of security?
What if people increasingly use AI to manage their own financial affairs rather than delegating decisions to institutions?
None of these questions requires pretending we can predict the future.
They require something much more modest.
Admitting that the future may actually be different.
The actuary’s question
This is where actuarial thinking becomes particularly interesting.
An actuary does not need to know precisely what will happen thirty years from now.
Actuarial thinking is about uncertainty.
Probability.
Risk.
Scenarios.
Dependencies.
Consequences.
It asks:
What are we assuming?
How confident are we?
What happens if the assumption is wrong?
Where are the concentrations?
What would make the system more resilient?
Those questions should sit much closer to the centre of long-term financial planning.
Because one of the greatest risks in a thirty-year plan may not be that the investment-return assumption is 0.5% wrong.
It may be that we have modelled the wrong world.
A financial forecast should tally with a world forecast
That does not mean trying to predict the year 2056.
It means explicitly considering plausible futures and asking whether the client’s life remains sufficiently resilient across them.
Perhaps one future contains stronger economic growth and transformative AI productivity.
Another contains persistent climate disruption and higher resource costs.
Another produces profound demographic and geopolitical shifts.
Reality will probably contain elements of several.
The purpose of planning is not to choose which one will occur.
It is to ask:
Would my life still work?
That is a much richer definition of financial security.
From optimisation to resilience
Much of twentieth-century financial planning developed around optimisation.
How much should I accumulate?
What return can I achieve?
How much tax can I save?
How efficiently can I withdraw the money?
Those questions remain useful.
But the twenty-first century may demand something more.
Resilience.
Resilience asks:
How many different ways can this life work?
How dependent am I upon assumptions outside my control?
What capabilities do I retain?
What can I adapt?
What decisions can I still make for myself?
What does “enough” actually require?
This is why agency matters too.
A resilient person is not simply someone with a large portfolio.
It is someone capable of understanding changing circumstances, making decisions and adapting their life.
Financial security and human agency are therefore more closely connected than our industry has traditionally recognised.
Plan the person and the planet together
There is an even deeper point here.
We often speak as if the individual and the world are separate things.
There is “my financial plan”.
And then, somewhere outside it, “the environment”, “society”, “technology” and “the economy”.
But that separation is artificial.
We live inside these systems.
Our wealth depends upon them.
Our wellbeing depends upon them.
Our choices affect them.
And they affect the choices available to us.
So perhaps planning a person’s future while ignoring the likely future of the world around them was always an incomplete form of planning.
The question is no longer simply:
How do I build enough money for the future?
It is:
What might the future require of me — and what forms of wealth will help me meet it?
That is a very different conversation.
And perhaps a much more important one.
Because your future financial life cannot be separated from the future world in which you will live.
Most financial plans forecast your money.
A Total Wealth Plan must also think about the world that money is being forecast into.
Academy of Life Planning 