Martin Wilcocks

I’m a financial, investment, and estate adviser, and an Amazon bestselling author, with over three decades of experience in banking and wealth management, having joined Barclays in 1989. I work with individuals and families who are approaching, or already transitioning into retirement - often at the point where complexity, fragmentation and uncertainty have quietly built up over many years. Most new clients arrive having lost sight of the full picture with multiple disjointed pensions that have accumulated across different roles and periods in time. They also tend to have ISAs and investment accounts spread across platforms, unclear asset allocation, duplicated holdings, poorly understood or excessive fees, and no clear view of what they can sustainably spend in retirement. Many also relied on standard spouse-to-spouse wills, which can leave families exposed to unintended sideways disinheritance and unnecessary inheritance tax. Our clients are typically successful people professionals, business owners, and senior executives, who are understandably busy and as a result, their financial affairs have 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, not a transactional planner. My work begins by consolidating pensions, ISAs, investments and cash buffers into a single, coherent framework. From there, I design and implement strategies that integrate retirement income planning, evidence-based investing, and robust estate and succession planning. A core part of my work involves helping clients move away from high-cost, instinct-driven investment approaches that consistently fail to deliver. Many have been advised within expensive financial networks, or through active fund and stock selection strategies where layered fees quietly erode capital over time and outcomes fall short. I replace this with our institutional-grade, evidence-based investment model '' EVEST™ '' which is designed to reduce unnecessary cost and complexity, improve long-term outcomes, and deliver sustainable income over a 20–30 year retirement. Alongside this, I help clients move beyond “wills that work” to estate structures that protect, addressing sideways disinheritance risk, blended families, remarriage exposure, and inheritance tax planning, so capital flows to 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 or health considerations emerge. This continuity allows decisions to be made calmly and deliberately, rather than reactively. My career began at Barclays, where I spent 14 years during the late 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s. Over time, as sales pressure increasingly replaced genuine client-first advice, I lived through the major mis-selling eras - Maximum Cover Plans, Endowments, and PPI. In my final years, I personally placed over £20 million of client capital into high-cost, low-return funds. By 2003, I knew I had to leave and build something different. Today, as we pass into 2026 my private office looks after 241 clients with approximately £160 million in estate assets and investment funds, the latter benefiting from our evidence-based, institutional-grade investment framework, EVEST™. My book Bulletproof Retirement became an Amazon #1 bestseller in three categories, and my work has been featured in The Times, The Telegraph, and The Mail on Sunday. Many of my clients’ personal stories and video testimonials are shared on our websites.