There's a conversation I have more often than the brochure would suggest. It rarely starts with pensions. It starts with a parent looking slightly troubled, saying some version of: I don't want my kids to grow up not knowing the value of money.
Fair enough. I feel it myself sometimes.
The version that's stayed with me is a man whose parents arrived here with almost nothing. Long hours, careful borrowing, very little spent that didn't need to be. It worked. He went to university, built a career, and now earns more in a month than they used to manage in a year.
And he feels faintly guilty about it.
His daughter, he said, wanted a twelve-quid Taylor Swift book. She got it. His parents would have walked to the library and waited.
Was he letting her down by making her life easier than his?
I don't think he was. I think it was the whole point.
The book wasn't the thing going wrong. It was the thing that had gone right. His parents didn't grind so the next lot could grind too. They did it so the next lot wouldn't have to. That was the goal all along. The library queue was never the inheritance. The freedom to skip it was.
It moves like that down the generations. One lot worries about food and a roof. The next has those and worries about security. The one after that has security and worries about health. Then education. Then whether any of it means anything.
Nobody's life gets objectively easy. People just trade up to better problems. The ones their parents never had the room to think about.
None of which means you raise children with no idea what things cost. But there's a difference between handing on judgement and manufacturing hardship to prove a point.
You don't have to recreate the struggle to pass on what the struggle taught you. You can just be honest about where the family came from, and clear about where it's going.
Which is most of what the job actually is.
Not the numbers, though we'll get those right. The thing underneath them.
What did the people before you give up. What do you want to make possible for the people after you. What does a life this well-funded actually look like, for your family specifically.
When people sit down with us, that's usually the real conversation, even when it arrives dressed as a tax question.
Not how do I stop spoiling them. More like: what did I work this hard for, and how do I make sure it counts.
Worth talking about, that one.