Martin Wilcocks

About

I’m a financial, investment and estate adviser, and bestselling author, with more than three decades of experience in banking and wealth management. I joined Barclays in 1989 and spent 14 years working across the retail bank, Barclays Life Assurance Co Ltd and ultimately, Barclays Private Clients. I established my own office in 2003, initially operating within one of the UK’s large financial networks. In 2006, I detached myself from the network, secured direct authorisation from the Financial Conduct Authority and have operated independently ever since. Today, I work predominantly with individuals and families who are approaching, or transitioning into retirement, often at the point where complexity, fragmentation and uncertainty have quietly accumulated over many years. Most new clients arrive having lost sight of the full picture. Quite often, they have multiple pensions accumulated across different employers and periods of their working lives. They may also have ISAs and investment accounts spread across different platforms, unclear asset allocation, duplicated holdings, poorly understood or excessive fees, and no clear view of what they can sustainably spend throughout retirement. Many have also relied on standard spouse-to-spouse wills which, while perfectly conventional, can leave families exposed to unintended sideways disinheritance, remarriage risk and unnecessary inheritance tax liabilities. My clients are typically successful professionals, business owners and senior executives. They are understandably busy and, as a result, their financial affairs can gradually become opaque, disjointed and unmanaged as a whole. My role is to restore clarity, control and long-term confidence. I act as a long-term private adviser rather than a transactional financial planner. My work will often begin by bringing pensions, ISAs and investments together into a single, coherent online portfolio. From there, I integrate retirement income planning, evidence-based investment management and robust estate and succession planning. A core part of my work involves helping clients move away from expensive, forecast-based and instinct-driven investment approaches which have too often failed to justify either their complexity or their cost. Many clients have previously been advised within expensive financial networks or through active fund and stock-selection strategies where layers of charges can quietly erode capital over time without producing a corresponding improvement in investment outcomes. Our institutional-grade, evidence-based investment model is designed to remove unnecessary cost and complexity, improve the probability of strong long-term outcomes and support sustainable income throughout what may be a 20 or 30 year retirement. Alongside this, I help clients move beyond simply having “wills that work” towards estate structures designed to protect family wealth, preserve it across generations and provide greater control over how and when assets are ultimately passed on. In practice, that means addressing sideways disinheritance, blended families, remarriage or repartnering exposure, inheritance tax mitigation and succession planning, so that capital ultimately reaches the right people, in the right way, at the right time. My service is designed to last throughout retirement. I remain alongside clients as markets cycle, tax rules change, spending needs evolve and family, business or health considerations emerge. That continuity allows important financial decisions to be made calmly and deliberately rather than reactively. Today, in 2026, my private office looks after around 300 clients, with new relationships historically developing at approximately one per month. Collectively, those clients have approximately £160 million in investment funds and wider estate assets. My book, Bulletproof Retirement, was published in 2022 and became an Amazon bestseller across three categories: Personal Finance, Risk Management and Retirement Planning. The work I have done with clients has also led to recognition through independent client reviews and verification via VouchedFor, together with features in The Times, The Telegraph and The Mail on Sunday. Most importantly, many of the people I advise are happy to tell their own stories. Their personal experiences and video testimonials can be found across my websites and provide perhaps the clearest explanation of what it is like to work with me and my private office.