Present Archives - Financial Planning in Surrey

Are you building a bridge to your future?

Dominic Thomas
Jan 2026 • 2 min read

Are you building a bridge to your future?

Financial planning straddles the past, present and future. Here at Solomon’s, we like to start with the end in mind, the second habit of “highly effective people”. We need to know what you are aiming for and where you are now. It’s helpful, significantly so, to also know enough about the history that has lead to where you are presently.

One of the many problems with great financial planning is that it requires time and therefore patience. A combination that is not something that is easy to master and arguably the antithesis of our current cultural impulses; it’s also problematic because you only get the long-term once.

Compounding investment returns is a crucial part of your plan, in practice we are not magicians and really have three main ‘dials’ to operate – spending, contributing and time. So I wonder if you would consider the example of an actual bridge – the one that you have probably known about since early childhood nursery rhymes and probably crossed more than once … London Bridge. Construction of the first stone bridge started in 1176 and took around 33 years to complete; at the time it was the sole bridge across the Thames.

For hundreds of years, London Bridge was the only crossing of the River Thames. It had a total monopoly.

If you wanted to cross the bridge to get to the City, you paid a fee
If you wanted to sail under the bridge, you paid a fee
If you wanted to fish off the bridge (ill-advised in the Thames most of the time!), you paid a fee
If you owned one of the 140 shops/houses on the bridge, you paid a fee

Since opening in 1209, those payments have been accumulating and administered by Bridge House Estates (now called City Bridge Foundation). To give a sense of scale, the 816 years of being open for business until 2025 is obviously a very long time indeed.

To give you a sense of what compounding can do, if you’d invested the princely sum of £100 in 1209 and made a 3% return every year for the last 816 years, you’d have £2,986,588,300,073 today.

Today, now a charity doing all sorts of work and also the owner of Blackfriars Bridge (1769), Southwark Bridge (1819), Tower Bridge (1894) and the most recent Millennium Bridge (2000), the Foundation has annual income of over £42m a year, of which around £10m is from admissions and visits. The latest accounts report assets worth over £1.6bn. This gives rather a lot of meaning to terms like “spanning the generations” and is some serious legacy planning! Imagine the wealth of history that the bridge has witnessed – albeit rebuilt several times.

References:

Report and Accounts: https://www.citybridgefoundation.org.uk/about/governance/annual-reviews-and-reports

Charity: https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/en/charity-search/-/charity-details/1035628/assets-and-liabilities?_uk_gov_ccew_onereg_charitydetails_web_portlet_CharityDetailsPortlet_organisationNumber=1035628

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What decisions would you alter from your past?

Dominic Thomas
August 2024 • 3 min read

What decisions would you alter from your past?

The appearance of Michael J Fox on the Pyramid stage at Glastonbury with Coldplay was a reminder of the need to savour the moments that we have.

For those who don’t know, Michael J Fox has had a successful career in film and television, most notably for his performance as Marty McFly in the Back to the Future movies. He has since revealed his battle with Parkinson’s disease which has had an increasingly debilitating effect.

In the original movie, teenager Marty McFly travels in time from 1985 to 1955 and meets his parents when they were at High School. The difference in fashion, attitudes and culture in just three decades made for good entertainment. Today it is now longer since the film was released than the time travel that Marty experienced, nearly a decade longer! As with most time travelling fantasies, the lesson learned is that a change in the timeline will likely lead to different outcomes.

Aporia is yet another film on the topic, but rather than travel back, time is bent to change the past. Malcolm’s sudden death as a result of a drunk driver leaves Sophie widowed and struggling to make ends meet, their daughter Riley is becoming increasingly disinterested in school or friends. Malcolm’s friend seems to have done the impossible in his spare room and invented a working Time Machine. Sophie (despite having seen Back to the Future!) decides to interrupt the time continuum with the hope of preventing the fatal accident.

I am sorry to say that my pedantic self took over as events unfold, I immediately thought, why don’t you now take out a decent level of life assurance! This is your warning, you have seen how difficult life can be when tragedy strikes and a lack of funds merely compounds the difficulty. Whist money does not compensate for the loss of a loved one, it certainly helps survivors to cope and continue.

No, it’s not terribly romantic of me is it! But then my view is that romance is for the living. Early in my career there was a well-known training film about the impact of death on a family. Its aim was to highlight the importance of life assurance and the relieving of stress on a widow… which of course had the agenda of getting me (and every other adviser) to sell more life assurance.

Over the years I have worked with many people who have lost a loved one. Some were far better prepared than others and some were not prepared at all. We get constant reminders that life is short and death is inevitable; yet most of us avoid thinking through the consequences of our death on the families and businesses we may leave behind.

It’s time to change that. You can take action today, there are not as many tomorrows as you think.

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