Financial Planning When Your Child Has Special Needs

Going back to those early days, Bryony, was there a period of grieving an expected future and timeline that you'd already constructed in your own mind? And how did you deal with that?

So we did go to lots of therapy, and I think that that was one of the things that they really told us to do.

What's quite hard when something like this happens is that you sort of grieve all the losses of what you expect a typical child to have.

Which is so wrong in the fact that when our first child was born, we weren't planning her wedding or where she was going to go to varsity or what she was going to do.

We were just doing today.

So we had to do a lot of work on living in the just today, which Gareth and I have done a lot of that together, which has been fantastic.

We've been very lucky in the fact that we come from a very supportive extended family.

So cousins and people around us.

So they helped us a lot in the beginning, getting through all of that sort of stuff.

And then Gareth is a very grounded person and I always call him the anchor.

He's remembered to bring us back to the fact that we can only do today and we can do today and we can do this week and we can plan for that.

And similarly, so when we will talk about something and we'll say, well, what's going to happen with Jade then? He'll sort of go, OK, great.

So what's going to happen with Kerry then? And I'll go, OK, I get the point.

We'll come back to let's just do this next chapter.

which has been incredible from a financial planning point of view, maybe not as incredible because we might have thought about some other things, but it has got us through and it's got us the strength to be able to get to where we are today,

which has been phenomenal.

And there is that tension, though, to your point, that often when we talk, Kim, it's about planning.

It's about trying to foresee or at least lay the groundwork for a future that we foresee today.

But in an environment like this, that is very difficult to do.

So how do you then start to marry the kind of long-term framework that we try and encourage with the ability to realize sometimes you've just got to live in the moment given the situation?

So I agree that we live in the moment given the situation.

But at the same time, I think you can complement it with the planning.

So for many times when we do work with clients that do have a child that they're going to need to take care of for the rest of their lives, the planning is different.

So the way we structure it is more to discuss...

So we're always looking at the younger person in the relationship's age, 100.