If you are considering becoming a client of Planning for Life you are probably what James Alexander and the late Richard Duvall, both instrumental in the development of Egg Bank and Zopa, would have called a “freeformer”. Your core value is to lead an authentic life defined by no one but yourself. Your spending habits are “defined by your values and beliefs, the choices you make, where you spend your money”. You will have left, or are about to leave, the corporate world and this trend, the Freedom Trend, is taking you towards a more independent, entrepreneurial lifestyle.

You may be developing new family structures with one partner maintaining a corporate role whilst both invest in a new venture. Your economic family unit is based on multiple incomes and you are one of a new generation of self-reliant consumers.  You lead, or want to lead, portfolio lives, with your time split more evenly between your business, your family and work in the community or local charity.

You are a full participant of the IT based society, which you see as the route to self-expression, choice, freedom and individuality. The digital networked economy is becoming more and more integral to your entrepreneurial life.

With your large and growing number of virtual and real connections around the world, you find yourself in a much stronger position to get involved in start-ups and micro-businesses.  A characteristic of your type of entrepreneurship will be where small families, or a group of families, set up in consumer markets and use word of mouth to spread their ideas, products and services.  You are no longer about just designing, producing, buying and selling products and services; you are part of a new and changing world centred on identity, communication, people, markets, brands and trust.  As your attitude to money changes you and your family are beginning to behave like a small business in which the assets of your home and income streams blend together.

You will use the net to look after yourselves and your friends and use your network of friends for advice about what to do, where to go and how to get there. You use the Internet to develop personal and business relationships that were never before possible.  When you want to buy something you no longer go straight to a company’s website.  Probably you’ll go first of all to a forum or discussion group, then you might talk to your friends (virtual and real) and finally you might explore the website of a company that other people seem to think works well.

You have little trust in corporations or the State. You are beginning to see politicians as more and more irrelevant as you talk to people around the world who you may have never met and probably will never meet, but with whom you can build a community to change the world into the way you want to see it.  

And when you spend your money you will refuse to see yourself as part of a mass market in which you bought the same food, went on the same holidays and listened to the same music and did the same things as everyone else.  You see yourself as unique.  You pick your own playlist for your iPod and build your own holiday rather than buying a package.  You cease to have loyalty to iconic retail brands, but you prefer to select resources that can be cultivated to define your specific and individual taste.

You value your independence and new way of life, but recognise the higher risks involved; in particular, you recognise the need to forward plan and make projections about your income and expenditure, and to look at the impact of lifestyle and entrepreneurial decisions on your cash flow and wealth. This is probably why you are visiting this site now.

This is the new world in which you want to belong. Your integrity has been put under strain in the corporate world. A re-assertion of your values, changes in your attitudes to money and a highly interconnected world have all come together to give you the opportunity to ride the Freedom Trend.

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