A short note on the question we hear most often from clients in their forties. The honest answer is: earlier than most people do.
The most common pattern we see is clients who start serious retirement planning conversations in their late fifties or early sixties, often triggered by a specific event - a redundancy, a business sale, a partner's retirement, an illness in the family. By that point, the time available to adjust the financial plan is limited, and many of the most useful tax-efficient strategies are constrained by the timeframe.
The work is more effective when it starts earlier. From the early forties onwards, the structure of a financial plan can adjust to accommodate the retirement goal in ways that compound over time - pension contributions, investment structure, tax-efficient saving, the gradual repayment of debt against the gradual building of retirement assets.
In our view, the right time to start the formal retirement planning conversation is when retirement is approximately twenty years away. That gives enough time for the planning decisions to compound and enough flexibility to adjust as the client's circumstances change.
If retirement is currently between fifteen and twenty-five years away for you, and you have not yet had a structured retirement planning conversation, it may be worth arranging one.