It’s easy to mistake being rich for being wealthy. By focusing almost exclusively on pension valuations, ISA limits, and tax wrappers, we tend to define wealth as a purely numerical accumulation.
It’s a narrow vision of what wealth really is. True wealth in life is about relationships and that sense of belonging. It's about having emotional resilience, and living a pain-free life – with the autonomy to decide how to spend your time.
A client may be financially rich but ‘time poor’. And what's the point of financial success if you can't enjoy it? That’s where the idea of ‘funded contentment’ comes in.
What is funded contentment?
Funded contentment is the ability to underwrite a life that is meaningful to the individual – it’s not the constant search for more. It's about funding what makes you feel content, put simply.
In an episode of the Money:Mindshift podcast, I spoke to Brian Portnoy – the founder of Shaping Wealth and leading voice in behavioural finance. His work focuses on shifting the industry's gaze from the 'how much?' of money to the 'what for?'. He argues that the ultimate goal of financial advice is not asset growth, but the achievement of ‘funded contentment’.
He agress that there's a distinction between being 'rich' and being 'wealthy'. To be rich is the relentless search for more, but a recent achievement quickly becomes no more than the mundane baseline.
Wealth, on the other hand, is a mindset. It means making the most of your resources in a way that feels true to you. Portnoy describes this as the financial ability to afford a life (funded), and the clarity of what that life should look like (contentment).
Why many people are wealthier than they realise
With this in mind, it suggests that many people are actually much wealthier than they realise. That clients may already have the resources to fund what actually brings them joy.
To help clients navigate this, Portnoy has introduced the four Cs of contentment:
- Connection: The sense of belonging to a group or tribe
- Control: The autonomy to make independent choices
- Competence: Finding mastery and meaning in daily work
- Context: Attachment to something bigger than yourself, such as faith or community
By using these pillars, advisers can move away from big-picture purpose questions, and instead focus on micro-actions that drive daily satisfaction.
Encouraging clients to imagine their future regrets
This shift in thinking requires a fundamental change to the discovery process. Instead of starting with a spreadsheet, advisers should focus on identifying a client's future self and any potential future regrets. Helping them to imagine their future self could contribute to them making responsible financial decisions today.
Advisers might ask clients to imagine their future regrets – such as not spending enough time with children or staying in a soul-destroying job, for example – and then 'fast reverse' to the present to adjust their financial plan accordingly.
The goal is to redirect clients to what’s important to them, their loved ones and their futures.
The Money:Mindshift podcast
Tune into our podcast where author, financial wellbeing pro and host, Dr. Tom, chats with experts about shifting your financial perspective.
Help clients spend for connection
By evolving the fact-find (and our interpretations of wealth) to include the thinking behind the idea of funded contentment, advisers could provide a level of value that transcends basic investment management.
In our human-centric advice webinar series, you’ll find a tangible example of a human-centric planning meeting that goes beyond financial wealth assessment could look like. They count as CPD hours, too.
Through this, advisers could become the architects of a client’s autonomy. They're ensuring that every pound in the portfolio is working toward a sense of connection, control, and competence. This is true wealth in itself.