Hello
I'm Steve Conley, founder of the Academy of Life Planning.
I am 65 this year. I have no financial capital. And I am the most content I have ever been.
That is not a contradiction. It is the point.
To understand the Academy — what it is, why it exists, and why everything in it is connected — you first need to understand me and how I got here.
I chose a way of living that gives me lasting contentment. A life of significance and contribution. Built on human capital rather than financial capital. On purpose rather than product.
The GAME Plan is not something I teach. It is something I live.
Perhaps you can too.
Steve Conley BSc FCII — Chartered Financial Planner, Chartered Insurer, Registered Life Planner, Mathematics Graduate. Founder, Academy of Life Planning. Global Ambassador, Transparency Task Force. Building this since 2012. Still going.
The Academy of Life Planning — The Ecosystem
One Mission. Built Over a Lifetime. Come of Age in the Age of AI.
Start Here — With Me
To understand the Academy of Life Planning, you have to understand the GAME Plan.
And to understand the GAME Plan, you have to understand me.
Not because this is about me. But because I am the proof of concept.
I am 65 this year. I have no financial capital. Not because I did not plan — I saved into pensions throughout a long corporate career, to the maximum, every year.
But at 50, life turned on a single decision.
I chose integrity over exploitation. I walked away from a senior career inside the financial services industry — the Head of Investments at HSBC, leadership roles at RBS and Santander — because I could no longer reconcile what the system rewarded with what I knew was right.
I lost my pension savings to two divorces and the taxman.
I built the Academy instead.
Living with integrity — before the coming of the age of AI — has been difficult. It has given me a basic standard of living. Nothing more.
But it has given me something the corporate world never did.
It has given me my Ikigai.
What Is Ikigai
Ikigai is a Japanese concept that translates, roughly, as the reason you get up in the morning.
It sits at the intersection of four things:
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What you are good at
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What you love to do
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What the world needs
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What the world will pay you for
Most people spend their lives optimising for one or two of these. The financial services industry I left optimised almost entirely for the fourth — what the world will pay for — while systematically neglecting the other three.
My Ikigai is this:
Helping people recover human agency in a world of structurally untrustworthy financial systems.
That is what I am good at. That is what I love. That is what the world needs. And that — slowly, then suddenly, in the age of AI — is what the world is beginning to pay for.
What I Epitomise
I am the GAME Plan applied to a life.
I set goals grounded in values — not income targets or career milestones, but a clear sense of what I am here to do.
I took actions that aligned with those values — even when they were costly. Especially when they were costly.
I managed my means with what I had — which, for most of the last 15 years, has been almost entirely human capital. Knowledge. Experience. Relationships. Reputation. Craft.
And I have executed — year after year, through financial pressure, personal loss, and a market that was not yet ready for what I was building.
Life for me would be scary for most people.
I am not scared.
I am happy completing my life mission.
That is what the GAME Plan does when you apply it honestly and completely.
The GAME Plan — Life Before Money
The GAME Plan™ is the framework at the heart of everything the Academy does.
It is not a financial planning tool. It is a life planning tool.
G — Goals: What do you want your life to look like? Not your portfolio. Your life.
A — Actions: What are the specific, structured steps that move you from where you are to where you want to be?
M — Means: What resources — financial and human — do you need to get there? How do you align them with your goals?
E — Execution: How do you implement, review, and renew — over and over — so that your plan stays alive as your life changes?
In the GAME Plan, we live values-led and purpose-driven lives.
We know who we are — defined by our values.
We know why we are here — defined by our talents, and the belief that our talents are gifts, and that our life purpose is to use those gifts in the service of others.
A life mission, if you like.
I know mine. It took me 50 years and a great deal of loss to find it clearly.
But I found it. And I am living it.
What Has Changed
For 14 years, I built the Academy in a world that was not yet ready for it.
The model made sense. The evidence was clear. But the market was not yet feeling what I could already see.
AI has changed that.
Not gradually. Suddenly.
The age of AI is transferring agency — from systems that are structurally untrustworthy, from experts who use information asymmetry as a business model, from institutions that profit from dependency — back to individuals.
That transfer of agency is exactly what the GAME Plan was built for.
The Academy ecosystem — everything I have built over 14 years — has come of age.
Not because I changed direction. Because the world finally caught up with the direction I was already heading.
The Ecosystem — Everything We Do
The Academy of Life Planning is not a single product or a single service. It is an ecosystem — built around one mission, expressed through multiple channels, serving people at every stage of their relationship with financial systems and their own lives.
Here is everything, and how it fits together.
For Individuals — Recovering Financial Agency
Total Wealth Plans — totalwealthplans.com Done-by-you — Free
The Total Wealth Plan is an AI-enabled financial planning tool available free to anyone, anywhere in the world. It works in 100+ languages and currencies, covering local tax and pension systems across 6 continents.
90% of people, 90% of the time, are capable of managing their own financial lives with the right tools. The Total Wealth Plan is those tools.
This is the democratisation of financial planning. No adviser required. No product sold. No conflict of interest.
Just a clear, comprehensive picture of your financial life — built by you, owned by you, on your terms.
Total Wealth Planner — totalwealthplanner.com
Done-with-you — from £245/year
For the moments that the app cannot handle. Complexity. Stress. Significant life change.
At those moments — which happen to most people perhaps 1 in 10 times — you need an expert on your side of the table. Not someone selling you something. Not someone managing your money for a fee you cannot see.
A Chartered Financial Planner working alongside you. Hourly paid. Conflict-free. No products. No commissions.
Services range from a year of bottomless email Q&A support at £245, through to intensive monthly mentorship for those navigating major financial complexity.
Get SAFE — get-safe.org.uk [Support After Financial Exploitation]
— Free to those who need it
Not everyone comes to financial planning from a position of stability.
Some people have been harmed. Mis-sold. Exploited. Left in financial ruin by an industry that was supposed to serve them.
Get SAFE provides free, independent, pre-legal support for people affected by financial exploitation. We help you get organised, understand what has happened, and think clearly before anything becomes legal.
No legal advice. No claims management. No conflicts of interest. Just support — on your side.
Goliathon — via Get SAFE
AI-powered citizen investigator programme — Free
David versus Goliath.
That is what it feels like when an individual takes on an institution that has harmed them. The institution has lawyers, systems, and time. The individual has a pile of letters, a fragmented timeline, and a story that makes sense in their head but looks like chaos on paper.
Goliathon is an AI-powered citizen investigator programme that helps victims of financial exploitation organise their case — calmly, clearly, and without pressure.
Six structured sessions. Guided use of AI tools including Claude. Workbooks and templates. Everything you need to go from confusion to clarity — at your own pace.
Free to anyone who needs it.
For Financial Professionals — Reforming the Profession
The Academy of Life Planning — academyoflifeplanning.com Professional development — from £545/year
The financial planning profession is changing faster than most firms are prepared for.
Clients are arriving better informed. AI is absorbing the technical work that once justified ongoing dependency. The product-led model is straining under the weight of a world it was not built for.
The Academy trains financial professionals to operate in this new environment — moving beyond product intermediation toward a conflict-free, client-agency Total Wealth Planning practice that is regulatory light, commercially resilient, and trusted by clients in a way the old model cannot replicate.
Four structured pathways to Total Wealth Planner accreditation:
Remote Pathway™ — £545/year Independent study. Global. At your own pace.
Community Pathway™ — £1,250/year Peer group learning. 48 live sessions per year.
Standard Pathway™ — £2,995/year Personal monthly mentorship. Practice website included.
90-Day Glidepath™ — £3,995 Accredited, live, and trading in 90 days.
Over 60 practitioners have already made this transition. The Academy is their professional home.
Adviser Exit Support™ — academyoflifeplanning.com/adviser-exit-support
Pre-legal commercial support — from £750
Not every adviser is free to make the transition.
Many are trapped — by business sale and purchase loan arrangements, by network lock-ins, by contractual obligations that feel disproportionate to the value of the relationship. Facing six-figure repayment demands. Subject to restrictive covenants that simultaneously restrict their income and enforce their debt.
Adviser Exit Support™ provides pre-legal commercial intelligence for regulated advisers facing exit pressure — drawing on my experience as a former Business Development Director of one of the UK's largest IFA networks, and 40 years on the inside of the industry applying exactly the kind of pressure these advisers are now experiencing.
Not legal advice. Commercial intelligence. The thing lawyers cannot provide.
Strategy Session — academyoflifeplanning.com/strategy-session For advisers who want clarity — £995 until 31 March 2026
For advisers who are not yet ready for a pathway — but who can feel the ground shifting and want a focused, honest conversation about what it means for their practice.
90 minutes. Written summary. Clarity you can act on immediately.
What Holds It All Together
Every part of this ecosystem is an expression of the same mission.
Recovering human agency in a world of structurally untrustworthy financial systems.
The Total Wealth Plan gives individuals the tools to manage their own finances — without an expert, without a product, without a conflict of interest.
Get SAFE and Goliathon give those who have been harmed by the system the structure and support to fight back — calmly, clearly, and on their own terms.
The Academy gives financial professionals the pathway to practise differently — to sit on the client's side of the table, to be trusted rather than tolerated, to build something commercially resilient in the age of AI.
Adviser Exit Support™ gives those who are trapped the commercial intelligence to exit the old model with dignity and preserved options.
And the GAME Plan — at the centre of everything — gives individuals and professionals alike the framework to design their lives before their finances, to lead with values rather than products, and to build a life that is genuinely theirs.
Why This Matters Now
I built this ecosystem in a world that was not yet ready for it.
The financial services industry — structurally designed around information asymmetry, product distribution, and client dependency — had no reason to change while it remained profitable.
AI has changed that calculation permanently.
The information asymmetry that sustained the old model is gone. Clients have access to everything. The expert's role is no longer to hold information — it is to provide wisdom, judgement, and human companionship through complexity.
That is exactly the role the Total Wealth Planner was designed to play.
The ecosystem I built over 14 years — in difficult financial circumstances, without institutional support, on the strength of conviction alone — is the right infrastructure for the world that is arriving.
I am 65. I have no financial capital.
But I have something more valuable.
I have a life mission that is coming of age at exactly the right moment.
And I have the Academy — a community of over 800 members on 6 continents, 60+ accredited practitioners, a globally capable AI planning tool, and a growing movement of professionals choosing to practise differently.
That is what the GAME Plan looks like when you apply it to a life.