How I invest: The dad making sure his kids will retire early as well
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16 July 2026
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Robert, 65, is currently enjoying the slower pace of retired life. A keen cyclist, now with more time explore the National Cycle Network routes near – and far – from his home in the northeast, and bond with his first grandchild.
But the foundations of this were set over 40 years beforehand when, at aged 21, Robert got his first job and asked the interviewer “what sort of pensions arrangement do you have?”
A rare mindset for any 20-year-old to have, but Robert says he felt “compelled to ask because I did have this sense, even back then, that I had my future life in mind”. “Every £1,000 you put away buys you a month off work at the end of your life,” Robert says (although with inflation this is now around two to three weeks). But the premise of ‘saving for your future self’ was a very clear concept to him, even then.
“What people don’t realise is doing that is an investment in bringing forward that retirement date,” Robert says.
“It’s also buying you flexibility later in life. You might want to go part-time or drop down to three or four days a week and you want the flexibility and resilience to be able to do that without exiting your job fully is a really powerful thing.”
Now, Robert is applying that future planning to his kids, and not just because he wants them to become as time-rich as him, but he says, he’s worried at how they’ll be able to retire at the state pension age – 67 – purely because of how “tough” their pension pathway is versus his.
Mid reading Eliza Filby’s book Inheritocracy, which argues that our futures are not determined purely by how hard we work and save, but whether or not we have access to the Bank of Mum and Dad, and that financial leg up.
“I’ve always been conscious that it’s up to me to sort it out and not relying on someone else,” Robert says, but says that his kids face a more financially demanding future than he did at their age and it worries him.
“I’m really conscious of the pressures on young people these days. I’ve got a son who lives and works in London, so the sort of pressure on young people to be able to afford just to make the end of the month without going into the red is pretty significant,” he says.
“I’m mindful of being in a position to be able to support our children even if they’re grown up now when they’re laying their foundations and having a family and doing the things that we did 40 years ago is important to me.”
To do this Robert has taken a three-pronged approach to his money in retirement, with a split focus on what he and his wife need for income and building and protecting their wealth to pass onto their family.
Plan A: putting on your own seatbelt first
While investing for their kids is a major focus, Robert needs to make sure he will be able to cover his own retirement first, especially with how expensive a good road bike is nowadays.
Alongside his two defined benefit (DB) pensions he’s now cashed in from his years working in a publishing house and later for the government as well as his own firm, Robert has what he calls his ‘cash and bonds SIPP (Self-invested personal pension)’, which he uses as his ‘drawdown’ account to generate the income needed.
Plan B: Operation ‘aggressive compounding’
The second strand is a second SIPP, but this one is for his children and grandchild(ren) to inherit.
When his kids were 15, Robert opened a SIPP for each of them with a lump sum of inheritance money and added to it year-by-year. When his grandchild was two, they got the same, potentially making them the youngest person ever to have a pension pot.
As Robert was getting ready to retire a couple of years ago and recalibrating what he’d need from his portfolio he also made the decision to overhaul the pension pots he’d set up for the next generation when it became apparent that a lot of the wealth he’s accrued would likely go unspent during his own retirement.
Working with a financial adviser, Robert moved his kid’s SIPP into a more aggressive risk profile on the basis that he was projecting a 30-year time horizon for their pots.
“We said if this is going to sit invested for another 30 years or so, until our children are of pension age, why on earth are we taking a moderate risk attitude towards that? We should be maximising the risk on that because it’s likely to be invested for another 30 years or so, or even longer,” Robert says.
Now sat at a mid-six figure sum, this portfolio has 20 funds in it, with a quarter focused on a “drawdown” element if it’s needed, while the rest is “just going to sit there and grow”.
This has resulted in a blend of global equity income funds, providing that dividend element, and a series of thematics, namely; sustainable energy, biotech, healthcare, and agriculture”.
“It’s very much with an eye on the future,” Robert says.
On how the funds were chosen, Robert left that call to the adviser and their recommended list.
“They run with it,” he says. I’m not going to interfere with that. I’m handing money over and letting professionals do their job.”
So far, it’s paying off, with the SIPP up 23% over the past year, 43% over three and 51% since 2021.
Plan 3: Buy what you can see
Robert also has a Stocks and shares ISA, on which he also leans on professionals’ expertise, but not via an adviser.
Taking his own “hands on” approach, Robert invests in four investment trusts and 11 individual UK companies.
The former is where the ‘expert’ element is, giving him access to “tons of companies across the globe” with deliberately different remits via active managers.
“The big four”, as Robert called them, investing in Alliance Witan, City of London investment trust, F&C and Scottish Mortgage investment trust.
“That gives sort of global diversification across a lot of sectors and a lot of growing companies, and I’m happy to just let them do their job.”
When it comes to the stocks, Robert takes a very literal approach. “Just travelling around the country and seeing what’s going on you can see things and the trends that are obvious to me.”
Seeing workmen putting in cables for the multi-billion-pound grid overhaul led to National Grid and SSE “was a no brainer”, for Robert.
Next were insurers, those underwriting the development of the cities he could see changing around him: Legal and General, M&G, Aviva and Standard Life.
Robert is big on ‘buying what you see’ investing in “real things”, like supermarkets (Tesco is his pick), bricks and mortar (British Land and Land Securities) and healthcare (GSK) and hospitality (Whitbread).
He steers clear of things he feels have too much regulatory risk, namely bank or water companies and telecoms.
So far, the active and stock blend has turned his initial £100,000 into nearly £300,000, up 7% in the past year.
Eve Maddock-Jones: Funds and Investment Trust Writer
Eve joined AJ Bell in 2026 as a funds and investment trust writer. She was previously editor at Investment Week, reporting on all major retail investor news, covering funds and investment trusts, ETFs and regulation...
