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About Steve and the Academy
Experienced help.
Your decisions.
Your life.
Hello. I’m Steve Conley, founder of the Academy of Life Planning.
I help people work through important life and financial decisions, and help professionals build planning businesses that put people’s capability first.
You might be facing a change in your life, questioning an existing financial plan, considering your next business move or trying to regain control after financial exploitation.
My role is to help you understand your situation, explore your options and identify practical next steps—with ownership of the decisions staying with you.
Experience you can draw on
My career spans senior roles at HSBC, RBS, Santander and Royal London, including Head of Investments and Pensions at HSBC UK. I am a Chartered Financial Planner and Chartered Insurer, and a former chair of the British Bankers’ Association’s Bancassurance Steering Group.
That experience has given me an understanding of how financial institutions work, how their incentives shape what customers are offered, and where people need help seeing the wider picture.
In 2012, I founded the Academy of Life Planning to develop a different approach: helping people build the understanding and capability to shape their own lives, with expertise available when they need it.
Since then, I have developed planning methods, practical tools and a professional community around that purpose.
Bring me the problem, not the portfolio.
Why the Academy exists
People often arrive with a question about money. Behind it is a question about life.
Can I change my work? What would retirement look like? How can I support my family? What matters enough to spend my time on? How do I move forward after something has gone wrong?
A useful plan connects those questions with the resources available to you.
We call this Total Wealth Planning. It considers your finances alongside your capabilities, relationships, health, time, environment and sense of purpose.
Money matters. So does the life it makes possible.
The Academy exists to help you bring those things together—and make decisions you understand and own.
How I can help
Work through a life or money problem
You may have an 18-month problem rather than a 30-year problem. You want experienced help with something specific, without committing to an ongoing advice relationship.
We can work through a life transition, examine the assumptions in your plan, organise competing priorities or prepare the questions you need to put to a specialist.
“I don’t need a product. I need an expert.”
Build your next planning business
You may be an adviser approaching retirement who still wants to contribute, a practising IFA exploring a parallel business model, or a coach or career changer who wants to help people without selling financial products.
I help professionals explore what an agency-led practice could offer, how it could work commercially and what competence and professional boundaries it requires.
The Academy’s training, accreditation and Practice Management Circle support that development.
Regain control after financial exploitation
Through Get SAFE—Support After Financial Exploitation—the Academy provides low-cost support to help people organise information, understand what has happened and prepare for appropriate next steps.
This includes people facing disputes with institutions, as well as professionals experiencing pressure or difficulties leaving an institutional relationship.
Practical tools help people manage their own records and questions, with specialist involvement where needed.
A practical method: the GAME Plan™
The GAME Plan connects what matters to you with what you can do about it.
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Goals: What do you want your life to look like, and what would enough mean for you?
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Actions: What practical steps could move you towards it?
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Means: What financial and other resources can you draw on?
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Execution: How will you act, review and adapt as circumstances change?
It starts with your life and turns reflection into a plan you can use.
Your tools. Your plan.
Human help when it matters.
Academy OS™ brings together practical apps that help you organise information, explore possibilities and maintain your own life and financial plan.
My Life Record is your free, evergreen home for your life record, with saved information held in your own Google Drive.
From 1 November 2026, Academy OS membership apps will move in phases to a gated system. One optional £4.99 monthly support subscription opens access to the whole collection, contributing towards maintenance and AI token costs. It is separate from Academy Membership.
My Life Record remains free and accessible whether or not you subscribe. Scorecards, quizzes and GiftFlow also remain free.
AI can help you prepare, explore and ask better questions. Human expertise adds context, challenge and support when a decision needs more attention.
Continuous agency. Episodic expertise.
Start with what matters now
You do not need to understand the whole Academy before speaking with me.
Bring one issue about your life, money or business to a 50-minute Strategy Zoom Meeting. We will clarify the problem, explore relevant options and identify practical next steps.
You may leave ready to act yourself, with a clearer brief for another specialist, or with an option for further work together.
The meeting stands on its own. There is no requirement to buy a programme or ongoing membership.