Yvonne Goodwin Wealth Management Limited

It started with a telephone call. A client rang me to say that they’d seen a retirement village and due to the fact that they were getting older and starting to think about possibly needing care and how one would cope without the other, saw this as their ideal solution.

The village was new, upmarket, with a leisure complex, restaurant and a minibus service to the local town.  The price of the apartments was naturally expensive, especially with a monthly service charge of over £600 per month on top. However, it was affordable within their financial plan and due to the facilities they regarded it as a price worth paying. The sales agent was pushing them to start the ball rolling.

‘So what do you think Yvonne?’ The inevitable question.  

I had the audacity to take a two week holiday in July – the first two week break since 2006.

Not only that but no calls to or from the office except for a dire emergency and no online social networking. Ann, Pav and Alyson coped admirably, my locum didn’t need a call out once.

One thing that really made me happy before departing was the fact that we told all our clients that we would be away and that the office would be fully staffed for admin and technical queries and their responses were all positive – was it that obvious that I needed a break?!

During the fortnight we were present at nine different ports throughout Europe, all of them industrial ports. Despite the slow economic growth figures and various countries throughout Europe having a debt crisis, these ports are very busy indeed. Containers being loaded and unloaded, end to end steel along the docks, and in places like Lisbon in Portugal and Cadiz in Spain there’s a lot of building work going on and very few empty shops.