This is how one adviser’s parents getting divorced helped shape her career.
Rakhee Wood, Founder and Independent Financial Adviser at Butterfly Financial Planning, had just graduated from university when she returned home to Bromley and found her family entering a four-year divorce battle that would shape both her attitude to money and her future career.
Her father had been the breadwinner, while her mother had looked after the home and their three children. When the marriage ended, Rakhee’s mother struggled to understand the legal letters, the family finances and whether any proposed settlement would leave her secure.
Rakhee, then 21 and newly graduated with a maths degree, became her mother’s “right-hand woman”.
She said: “I remember my mum not understanding any of the process: what was happening, how much she was going to get or whether she was going to be okay. The raw anxiety of that situation really stayed with me.
“Every couple of days, a letter would come through the door and she would say, ‘I don’t know what this means. How do I respond? What do I say?’ I became her friend in her pocket through the divorce process.”
Her parents arrived in Britain as refugees from Uganda in 1972 and built a new life through a fierce work ethic.
The division of labour was traditional. Her father built the business, while her mother ran the household and raised the children. She signed financial documents on trust.
That arrangement left her exposed when the relationship broke down. The four-year divorce eventually required barristers and a judge.
Rakhee said: “My mum was the homemaker and my dad was the breadwinner. I remember thinking I never wanted to be financially dependent on anybody after seeing that setup.
“She was being offered the house with the mortgage paid off, and that sounds like a big number. But how was she going to pay the bills? My two siblings were still hoping to go to university. It was about understanding what the settlement would actually mean month by month.”
Trainee
That distinction between possessing assets and understanding what they can provide now sits at the centre of her work at Butterfly Financial Planning.
Her first role provided another lesson in what financial advice should not look like: reviewing personal pensions potentially mis-sold during the 1980s and early 1990s.
Rakhee examined whether private-sector workers had been wrongly encouraged to leave valuable final-salary schemes for expensive personal pensions, calculating any compensation due.
She said: “I learned how not to do it before I learned how to do it. We had to become qualified advisers for the endowment review. A trainer asked whether I had thought about becoming a financial adviser, and that was how I moved into my first trainee position.”
Rakhee went on to build her career within banks but became increasingly uncomfortable with the product-led model of advice.
Rakhee felt banks lost their way with financial advice after reforms introduced in 2012 required greater transparency over fees and clients were mandated to pay directly for advice. In her view, the institutional model remained too focused on matching customers with an in-house product rather than first establishing what they wanted their money to achieve.
She stayed in banking while starting a family, but the idea of building a different type of firm remained. In 2017, when her children were three and four, Rakhee left the security of the banking world and established Butterfly Financial Planning.
The business was designed around the human and emotional side of money that she had witnessed during her parents’ divorce. Independence allowed her to begin with the client’s life rather than a bank’s product range, and to give people the clarity her mother had lacked when faced with unfamiliar assets, legal language and competing demands.
She wanted to replace conversations beginning with a pension or investment product with questions about the life the client actually wanted.
Rakhee said: “Under the banks, there was no visual life planning. It was: ‘You need a pension, so let me show you this fund.’ Before I talk about any product, I ask what the client’s plan is. If money were no object, where would they like to be in five years?”
The answers can include working part-time, helping children buy a home or travelling. Rakhee uses visual cash-flow planning to map income, expenditure and assets, showing whether the ambition is affordable and what might need to change.
It can lead to difficult conversations about saving more or working longer. It can also show cautious clients that they can afford to spend or retire without jeopardising their future.
Pitfalls
Rakhee said: “You could have £100,000 or £10 million, but people still feel anxiety about whether they have enough to do the things they want to do. It is difficult to look at £500,000 in a pension and understand what that means month by month after tax.
“Once we have thought through the pitfalls, it is almost like giving people permission to spend their own money. I have had a client buy a Jaguar in retirement and others take the holidays they always wanted. Why not, if the plan shows they can afford it?”
Her mother’s experience continued to influence her after the divorce. Within five years, she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s at 60 and eventually required full-time care. Navigating another intimidating system reinforced Rakhee’s belief that advice cannot be separated from the fear and uncertainty surrounding major life events.
That is evident in her work with divorcing clients. She encourages them to account for every asset, particularly pensions, rather than concentrating solely on keeping the family home or fighting over possessions with limited financial value.
Rakhee calls this the “peace premium”: recognising when compromise may protect a client’s finances, wellbeing and ability to move forward. She helps overwhelmed clients divide their jobs into what must be done now, soon and later.
She said: “The purpose is to empower people, make them feel confident and help them understand their numbers so they can live the best life they want to live.
“Going back to my mum, the anxiety crippled her because she did not understand where she stood. That is what I want to change for other people.”
