My Philosophy

MY PHILOSOPHY

I am going to be brutally honest with you, in my personal opinion the frameworks we were trained to use were mainly designed to manage the company liability, demonstrate compliance, and move assets from one structure to another with the minimum possible regulatory risk. The client — the actual human being sitting across the table — was largely incidental to the process.

I knew this within a few years of qualifying. I spent another fifteen trying to work around it within the existing system. Constantly battling against compliance, being told by senior managers that I “ask too many questions” and to just focus on bringing the money in. I moved around a lot because I never found a harmonious relationship with any employer and eventually I realised this was an impossible task, so I established my own companies.

I put in place specialist services that did answer the questions the senior managers didn’t want to deal with and when they finally lost a big contract - probably because the clients were fed up of being ignored — I had already moved on.

And everything was fine — until the Pandemic arrived.

Before then, everyone was chasing the same dream — big house, fast car, promotions, more money, more responsibility - then after the world was forced to pack up and go work from home, everyone decided they wanted a new life. Free time became a commodity. It had meaning. It had value and now they could see it.

They didn’t want the responsibilities anymore. They wanted to know how they could create the same level of income but work less.

Covid may have killed millions of people, but it also breathed life into those who had the eyes to see a life reimagined.

And so the clients started asking questions our industry had no language for, and I stopped trying to fix a system that was never broken and eventually we all started to build something new, which answered the one all important question: How do I break free?

I have sat with people at every point on the financial spectrum. But the best insight came early on in my career when I covered two branches for a major UK bank — one in an affluent market town, one in a financially disadvantaged area near the Scottish border.

What I found completely changed how I viewed wealth creation, because it offered a totally polarised view of everything I had ever known.

• The clients with the modest incomes — the ones the industry would have categorised as lower-value — had paid off their mortgages. Many were of them were habitual savers and of the baby boomer generation. The majority retired comfortably at sixty, because they had always lived within their means and had led simple lives.

• The affluent clients — the ones with the large portfolios and the impressive lifestyles — many of them were carrying a lot of debt. Their lives were complicated by business and tax structures. Very wealthy by every measure the industry uses but many of them stressed and unfulfilled in other aspects of their lives.

The thing is, the people society tells us should feel wealthy often don't feel it at all. They might offer up "comfortable" — but the reality is large tax bills, cashflow issues, and running your own business, does nothing to promote wellbeing.

And there is no amount of money that will ever fill a void created by feeling like you are never enough.

This isn't just my observation.

Economist Richard Easterlin documented what is now known as the Easterlin Paradox — the finding that beyond a basic threshold, rising income does not produce rising life satisfaction. Countries get wealthier - but ordinary people don't feel it at all.

Psychologist Tim Kasser's went a step further, finding that people who strongly orient their lives toward financial goals report lower wellbeing, more anxiety, and less sense of meaning — not more.

And Dr. Brad Klontz's work on Money Scripts — the unconscious beliefs that drive our financial behaviour — identifies a pattern he calls Money Focus: the belief that more money is the answer, combined with the discovery that the pursuit never quite satisfies. His research links this script directly to lower net worth and higher debt.

The chase itself becomes the trap.

Wayne Dyer described abundance as a frequency you have to tune into. I believe this to be true, because society has handed everyone an impossibly high benchmark, and that benchmark keeps moving. It doesn't matter what level of income you're at — it's almost hypnotic. The moment you reach the target, the target shifts. Psychologists call this hedonic adaptation: we return to our baseline level of wellbeing regardless of what we accumulate. Every new level quickly becomes the new normal.

And meanwhile, the people society writes off as low-income prospects? Many of them have no debt, a healthy pension, some savings, and own their property outright. What you may not realise is that by global standards, these people sit in the top ten percent of wealth in the world.

This is not an anecdote. It is a pattern — one I have witnessed across twenty years of managing client wealth, and one that is consistently supported by peer-reviewed research on money scripts, happiness thresholds, and the psychology of enough.

What society told you wasn't possible — is possible.

If everyone saved consistently, invested wisely, took on no debt, and lived beneath their means, the majority would be financially free by fifty. But modern life is not designed to support that strategy. And even if it were — the real question is what you would sacrifice to get there, and whether you would carry any regrets.

Of course, there is a balance to be had. But to know which direction is right for you, you need more than just an investment strategy or a recurring income. You need clarity about what you actually want from your life — and what internalised beliefs are influencing your current behaviours that could potentially sabotage that dream.

That is why I do what I do. I am here for the hard questions, the complex cases, and the heavy lifting.

Is it a wise move — or are you risking everything? Is it leverage — or is it a liability?

Behavioural finance — the work of Kahneman, Thaler, Ariely — has given us a brilliant map of the cognitive biases that distort financial decision-making. Loss aversion. Present bias. Mental accounting. This is genuinely important work. But it is descriptive, not transformational. It tells you what goes wrong and why. It does not give you a map of where you are in your relationship with money, where you might go, or how to get there.

The self-help and content creator space — Sahil Bloom's five types of wealth, Morgan Housel's psychology of money — has produced important and widely-read ideas. But ideas are not practice. None of these frameworks are offered by a regulated FCA adviser with twenty years of legal accountability for the outcomes of their advice. They create appetite. They cannot satisfy it. Or take responsibility for it not working out.

What did not exist — anywhere, in any form that I could find — was a framework that did all of the following simultaneously:

• Mapped the full spectrum of wealth consciousness, from financial trauma and bondage through to freedom, abundance, and sovereignty. Not as a hierarchy of worth, but as a landscape of states, each with its own data, its own medicine, its own path of transformation.

• Integrated the psychological, the relational, the financial, and the deeper dimension of meaning and purpose — not as separate modules but as a single coherent view of what wealth actually is and how it actually works in a human life.

This is why I developed my own framework - Dimensional Wealth® - which emerged from twenty years of running a financial planning practice, managing wealth. From the recognition that the gap between knowing and doing is never technical, from my own experience of financial loss and rebuilding, and from the certainty — confirmed by every client conversation I have ever had — that the map people need is not a balance sheet. It is a mirror.

Here is what twenty years of being a financial adviser— not academic financial planning, not content creation, not coaching, but regulated, accountable, consequential financial advice — has taught me.

People do not make financial decisions with their rational mind. They make them with their nervous system. With the emotional imprint of every money-related experience they have ever had. With the beliefs their parents carried, and their parents before them, passed down not through conversation but through behaviour — the way money was talked about or not talked about, the anxiety that settled over a household at the end of the month, the shame of having less or the guilt of having more.

Klontz's research at the Journal of Financial Therapy identified these patterns as money scripts — unconscious beliefs about money developed in childhood and carried, largely unexamined, into adult financial life. Four archetypes emerge consistently: money avoidance, money worship, money status, and money vigilance. Most people carry fragments of all four. Almost no financial planning process ever asks about them.

I ask about them. Not as a therapist — I am not a therapist — but as an adviser and also a licensed Money Scripts® Practitioner who understands that a financial plan built on top of an unexamined belief system is a plan built on sand.

The numbers will be correct - but the behaviour may not follow. Undoubtably, the client will drift back to pattern within eighteen months, and neither of us will fully understand why.

I also know this: financial wellbeing is not a state you arrive at. It is a state you inhabit — or don't — based on who you believe yourself to be in relationship with money. The research on financial wellbeing confirms what every good adviser already senses: it is multidimensional, it is subjective, it is shaped by perception as much as by circumstance. Two people with identical balance sheets will have completely different relationships with their wealth — because their inner landscape is different, their history is different, their sense of what they deserve is different.

This is the territory that my new framework Dimensional Wealth® was built to navigate.

Rachael Hall is a Times Top Rated and multi award-winning FCA regulated independent financial adviser & Coach with over twenty years of FCA-regulated practice. She is the creator of the Dimensional Wealth® framework and the founder of the FAR Project. She advises individuals, couples, families, NHS professionals and business owners with complex tax and retirement planning strategies.