How much is enough?

There is a question that haunts almost every working adult, yet it’s one most of us never pause long enough to properly ask: How much is enough?

We hustle. We save. We invest. We worry. We delay gratification, telling ourselves that one day, when the mortgage is paid off and the children have left home, we will finally feel secure. But for most people, that day never quite arrives. The goalposts keep moving. And in the meantime, life quietly slips past.

Paul Armson has spent decades watching this happen. Since the early 1980s, he has sat across the table from countless people who are, by any reasonable measure, doing well financially, yet who have no clear sense of where they stand or what their future holds. Not because they lack intelligence or diligence. Simply because nobody has ever helped them ask the right question.

That question is the one on the cover of this book.

Scott met Paul 15 years ago and immediately recognised something refreshingly honest in his approach. “In all my years in financial planning I had rarely come across someone so willing to challenge the conventions of our industry and so committed to putting people’s lives at the centre of everything. His thinking has had a lasting influence on me and on how we have built GPFM.”

At GPFM, we share Paul’s belief that great financial planning begins not with spreadsheets or investment strategies but with a conversation about life. What does your ideal future look like? What would you do if you knew you had enough? These are the questions we ask every client because we believe they are the only questions that truly matter.

Like Paul, we practise lifestyle financial planning. We start with you, your goals and your vision of a life well lived, and build a plan shaped entirely around that. We are not in the business of selling products or chasing returns. We are in the business of helping people understand what enough looks like for them.

Enough? refuses to play the game the financial services industry has long preferred. There is no jargon here, no complicated products, no pressure to accumulate ever more. Paul offers something rarer: clarity. Start with your life, work backwards to the money. It is a simple idea and a quietly revolutionary one.

Paul writes from personal experience. The sudden loss of his mother taught him what too many of us learn too late: life is not a rehearsal. He did not just tell clients to live well. He did it himself, semi-retiring at 45 to sail the world with his partner Lynn.

We hope this book prompts you to ask the same question of yourself. And if you would like help finding your answer, that is exactly what we are here for.

Read it. Then go and live your life accordingly.

Scott Atkinson FPFS
Managing Director
GPFM Financial Planners