The State of This

Dominic Thomas
Nov 2024 • 1 min read

The State of This

When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a King. The palace becomes a circus.

Today I must once again face the struggle to recognise that I cannot control very much at all. I cannot control how people vote either here or in another country. I have to come to terms with the sadness, anger and disappointment that for reasons I simply fail to understand, Americans have voted for someone who wouldn’t be fit to work in any organisation I have ever been involved with. In my sector, the regulator would not permit a position of authority to such a person and hopefully not even a license to practice. Think about that for a moment.

I can control my responses, which is far easier to say (and write) than it is in practice. I can acknowledge my feelings of rage and the decisions taken, for which I have a variety of colourful terms, but I will not give way to my ire here.

Despite being a sad moment (and from my perspective a very dangerous one) for most of the planet, I remain committed to positive change. To doing the little that I can to improve life for those in my orbit and where possible those outside of it.

We will be here, at the ‘coalface’ of the struggle between your values and value, between enough and too much, between lack and excess, between conflicting feelings and realities. The nuance of life in all its glory, the choices that each of us make on a daily basis as we step forward into an unknown future, which has today become a little more precarious than it was yesterday.

We only have time, the important things are those that unite and bind us as humans, which are surprisingly simple and often forgotten.

Hope not hate.

Life is brief, his tenure will end.

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The State of ThisJemima Thomas2024-11-06T13:47:33+00:00

Merry Christmas from the Solomon’s team

Jemima Thomas
Dec 2022 • 1 min read

Merry Christmas from the Solomon’s team

We hope you have a very merry Christmas, and are able to really take time to stop and relax. This year has been filled with the never-ending chaos that the world continues to throw at us all, so here’s hoping that 2023 is full of light and hope.

We are all now on our Christmas break and Solomon’s will be closed from lunchtime on Friday 23rd December. If your query is of an urgent nature, please call the office on 020 8542 8084 and leave a voicemail for us (these will be monitored during the festive break). We re-open on Tuesday 3rd January 2023.

From Left to Right: Sam, Dan, Dominic, Debbie, Jemima and Abigail.

Once again, from all the Team at Solomon’s – we wish you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

You can read more articles about Pensions, Wealth Management, Retirement, Investments, Financial Planning and Estate Planning on my blog which gets updated every week. If you would like to talk to me about your personal wealth planning and how we can make you stay wealthier for longer then please get in touch by calling 08000 736 273 or email info@solomonsifa.co.uk

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Merry Christmas from the Solomon’s teamJemima Thomas2023-12-01T12:12:39+00:00

EROTICISM AND FANTASY IN YOUR FINANCIAL PLAN

TODAY’S BLOG

EROTICISM & FANTASY? IS THIS ANOTHER CLICKBAIT TITLE?

Whilst some of you are new to the blog and proper financial planning, many of you are aware that financial planning, when done well, is not really about money. Its about you. Your values, your hopes and your lifestyle.

In 2020 most of us took a battering, a year unlike any we had known. Whilst we greeted 2021 with the relief that 2020 was over, we have come to realise that things are far from normal and that there is much that keeps us living with a deep sense of frustration and perhaps fear. As the UK passed 100,000 covid deaths, we recognise another rather depressing landmark.

The restrictions of the pandemic have not been easy, exposing the pressures in our lives and creating new ones. Whether you are married or single, many have found relationships and normal aspects of life to be under pressures that they never imagined. Working from home has its benefits, but the confinement isn’t always helpful. Perhaps your home is empty, perhaps it is rammed full of people, attention and connection has been ruptured. Not being able to hug or kiss friends and family, to enjoy the normality of human interactions has reminded us of who and what is important.

THE IMPACT OF LOCKDOWN

In February and March we all paid the price of investing with exaggerated market volatility, this was mercifully short-lived. It was also within our financial expectations, these things happen, regularly. The cause may be different, but the impact is not. The Government has been spending and it would seem handing out large sums of money to friends, this will have to be repaid by you and me, but what about the price our relationships have paid?

You may now be thinking to yourself, hang on, a financial planner has nothing to do with my relationships, where is this going? Let me cut to the chase. Money is often cited as a major cause of relationship breakdown. I don’t really believe it is. Not having enough or using it how you would like to can be. However, its deeper and more than that – it’s about your expectations which are a concoction of past experiences (“good” and “bad”) and your hopes for the future fused in the present.

Our hopes have been challenged and many have struggled with a sense of the future, particularly for young people. The magnitude of the stress on our wellbeing is significant. We have had many delights and joys removed and we have had to do the work of imagining, finding, creating and trying new ones. The loss of hope can be overwhelming, devastating, flattening and in many cases final.

REGAINING “EROTICISM AND FANTASY”

So, I am going to offer you another real challenge. In our culture, we have little or no education about relationships – in all forms. That’s not to say that we aren’t blasted with messages about them, that is constant, but rarely does intimacy in its broadest sense get discussed. Irrespective of whether you are in a relationship or not, have a look at some of the work by Esther Perel (an expert!).Yes, I am even going to suggest you do pay attention to her work on the erotic, (a word neither of us expected me to use in a financial blog!) a term that she uses broadly. In fact I am going to suggest that you invest (I use the word quite deliberately) all of 46 minutes watching her webcast on YouTube “How Eroticism and Fantasy Can Help You Embrace A New Year”. Now there is a title to frighten you right? …

Perhaps to put your mind at ease, Esther playfully uses the term erotic when “creativity” is the word that resonates. Her talk is about life, not about sex. I appreciate that this may evoke mixed feelings within you, but my intention is simply to offer some access to meaningful hope. Hope and optimism are the oxygen of investors and financial planning.

Don’t worry, I am not going to go any further with this, other than to say that if a financial plan is simply about money, it isn’t really your plan, its probably someone else’s. Your plans are unique to you and I know that at the heart of them is relationship and a sense of connectedness. Remember the redemption of Mr Scrooge just a month ago?

With my very best intentions, I challenge/encourage you to watch… If I have overstepped the mark, accept my apologies, if it’s helpful let me know. You need to start the video at 1:30 – it was a livestream broadcast.

Dominic Thomas
Solomons IFA

You can read more articles about Pensions, Wealth Management, Retirement, Investments, Financial Planning and Estate Planning on my blog which gets updated every week. If you would like to talk to me about your personal wealth planning and how we can make you stay wealthier for longer then please get in touch by calling 08000 736 273 or email info@solomonsifa.co.uk

GET IN TOUCH

Solomon’s Independent Financial Advisers
The Old Mill Cobham Park Road, COBHAM Surrey, KT11 3NE

Email – info@solomonsifa.co.uk
Call – 020 8542 8084

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GET IN TOUCH

Solomon’s Independent Financial Advisers
The Old Mill Cobham Park Road, COBHAM Surrey, KT11 3NE

Email – info@solomonsifa.co.uk Call – 020 8542 8084

7 QUESTIONS, NO WAFFLE

Are we a good fit for you?

Take Survey

PRIVACY POLICY | DATA PROTECTION

EROTICISM AND FANTASY IN YOUR FINANCIAL PLANDominic2023-12-01T12:13:10+00:00

TOMORROW’S WORLD

TODAY’S BLOG

PLANNING A FUTURE

The more I read or hear about the impact of the pandemic on real people I am reminded of how important it is to have a sense of the future. There is little doubt that many of us have been struggling with the practicalities of living detached from friends and family, or frankly anyone that we may not know, but form a part of our ordinary lives.

Monty Don made the point that having something to look forward to is ever so important, which is part of the reason why so many people love and enjoy gardening. Those of us with gardens have benefitted this year from fairly good weather and the ability to take more time to enjoy our open spaces. Many have remarked that during the Spring when were in the full lockdown phase, they observed the natural world in way that seemed to be a glimpse into a bygone time, of no cars or aeroplanes – to see and hear nature, as may have been observed centuries ago.

TOMORROW’S WORLD

You will probably remember the BBC1 programme “Tomorrow’s World”. It was something of a TV fixture for many people, irrespective of age. When I grew up there were only three TV channels and “Children’s television” officially ended just before the news, but programmes really didn’t stop appealing to children. Perhaps you will remember James Burke, Michael Rodd, William Woollard, Judith Hann and Maggie Philbin all explaining various inventions which would perhaps become commonplace lifestyle improving solutions. Many of the “predictions” turned out to be some way off the reality, others were quite clearly an early prototype.

Anyhow, it got me wondering about the importance of having a vision for the future. We have seen some welcome reassessment of the past, we cannot change it, but we can at least learn to understand it differently, specifically its impact on the present.

A PLACE IN TIME

Without a grasp of history and a hope for the future, I would argue that it is easier to become overwhelmed by the present. Today I could probably find shows like Tomorrow’s World, but I’d really have to hunt them down from not simply hundreds of channels but different media sources and they certainly would not be what the majority watched, all experiencing the occasion at the same time, which I also believe to be pertinent to our sense of time.

THE IMPORTANCE OF HOPE

The book of Proverbs has an interesting phrase “without vision the people perish”. That’s a pretty bold statement and of course, has been interpreted in all sorts of ways and probably used to justify all sorts of ideas. If I may, can I simply offer it as an acknowledgement of the value of having a sense of tomorrow. Having hope.

Many of us, (perhaps all of us) have had moments of despair at the current circumstances. Whether that is concern about health, family, friends, loneliness, financial pressure, worrying if your business (or your friend’s) will survive, if you will ever get to enjoy the things you did before… Then there is a very deep despair that overwhelms and leads to some believing that they have no future and so end the pain.

DON’T UNDERVALUE YOUR FUTURE

The future is something I discuss all the time with clients, but I have to admit that simply having a sense of a future itself (whatever that looks like) is rather more important than having no vision at all. Please get in touch if you need to talk or simply want me to listen. Perhaps your plans have altered, maybe some priorities have changed. Alternatively, maybe you know someone that I may be able to help to get their plan for their future into shape.

And for your amusement… here’s the team at Tomorrow’s World looking back at the 1970s as the new decade was about to begin from roughly 4 decades ago – which is typically how long people “work” for a living and increasingly how long retirement may last…

Dominic Thomas
Solomons IFA

You can read more articles about Pensions, Wealth Management, Retirement, Investments, Financial Planning and Estate Planning on my blog which gets updated every week. If you would like to talk to me about your personal wealth planning and how we can make you stay wealthier for longer then please get in touch by calling 08000 736 273 or email info@solomonsifa.co.uk

GET IN TOUCH

Solomon’s Independent Financial Advisers
The Old Mill Cobham Park Road, COBHAM Surrey, KT11 3NE

Email – info@solomonsifa.co.uk
Call – 020 8542 8084

7 QUESTIONS, NO WAFFLE

Are we a good fit for you?

Take Survey

PRIVACY POLICY | DATA PROTECTION

GET IN TOUCH

Solomon’s Independent Financial Advisers
The Old Mill Cobham Park Road, COBHAM Surrey, KT11 3NE

Email – info@solomonsifa.co.uk Call – 020 8542 8084

7 QUESTIONS, NO WAFFLE

Are we a good fit for you?

Take Survey

PRIVACY POLICY | DATA PROTECTION

TOMORROW’S WORLDDominic2025-01-28T10:06:34+00:00

Hopeful Christmas

Solomons-financial-advisor-wimbledon-blogger

Hopeful Christmas

Where does the time go? Only last year I blogged about my god-daughter Hope who had her first proper launch event. After a very busy year, she’s now released an EP album, called “Optimist” – that seems to be gaining some traction and climbing up the singer/songwriter charts. Now all of 16, her latest track is available on i-tunes. Perhaps one for the Christmas stocking?

Do have a listen, you can buy it for the princely sum of £3.14 on i-tunes.

Here’s the title video, which is dedicated to her late father and my very dear friend, who having suffered from a rare form of cancer (mulitple endocrine neoplasia) eventually died from the injuries resulting from a motorcycle crash in August 2006. You can find her on Jacket Records, a new small label run by Jack Hobbs, who also wrote a song for her “So Much More“.

As you know, I’m not a betting man, but I’d suggest that this is best investment for £3.14 you could make this Christmas and help to get the much needed Optimist on the radar.. what’s more you could order it right now from where you are. Happy Christmas.

Dominic Thomas
Solomons IFA

You can read more articles about Pensions, Wealth Management, Retirement, Investments, Financial Planning and Estate Planning on my blog which gets updated every week. If you would like to talk to me about your personal wealth planning and how we can make you stay wealthier for longer then please get in touch by calling 08000 736 273 or email info@solomonsifa.co.uk

Hopeful ChristmasDominic2023-12-01T12:19:42+00:00

Hope at Christmas

Sometimes, I probably stray a little too far from financial planning stuff within this blog, but that’s largely due to the fact that the clients I work for and wish to attract are people that have similar values to mine. As I have said before, if we are to work together, you may as well discard the glossy marketing and get a feel for who I am… after all there is so much more to both my clients and me than “money”. Anyway, on Saturday night I was part of a small crowd that was warmly welcomed to the home of the Kubrick’s who are generous advocates of local arts (the family of the late Director Stanley Kubrick) to support the launch of a new musician – Hope, my god-daughter.

Hope is only 15 and as you might imagine is still at school whilst making time to learn, practice and write new songs. Who knows if she will have a successful career in music, at this point she’s just having fun and seeing where it may lead. Hope’s parents are some of my closest friends since student days, and sadly her father Toby died of cancer some years ago in 2006 which was the first time that I had experienced the loss of someone close to me of my age. As close friends, Toby and his wife Kym were people that also helped me in the early days of my career, acting a little as practice guinea pigs for my evolving advice. He was also the first client that I had to make a claim for against a critical illness policy. Unfortunately Hope and her older brother have both been diagnosed with the same causal disease (MEN Type 1). This isn’t an appeal, I’m just helping to draw a little attention to her first EP, produced by a new small record label called Jacket Records which should you like can be bought at any digital music store for a few pennies and the largest store (itunes) link is here. She has a website – which you can also find out more information, her first track is called So Much More… I know her dad would have been very proud.

Dominic Thomas

Hope at ChristmasDominic2025-01-23T13:50:07+00:00