Most people assume financial anxiety is a money problem. The less you have, the more you worry. Earn enough, save enough, invest wisely enough, and the worry goes away. Dylan Ellis, who founded rockwealth's Chelmsford office after more than 10 years in financial services, has watched this assumption prove wrong more times than he can count. The anxiety, it turns out, doesn't much care what's in the account.
You know the feeling. It's somewhere between two and three in the morning, and you're wide awake running the numbers again. Not because anything has gone wrong. Not because a bill is overdue or a business is struggling. Everything, by any reasonable measure, is fine. And yet here you are.
So you check again. Refresh the portfolio. Run the projections one more time. The numbers still look fine. The worry doesn't care.
It's a bit like a burglar alarm that keeps triggering in a house nobody has broken into. The doors are locked. The valuables are safe. But at 3am, the alarm goes off anyway, set off by a draught, a passing car, a shift in temperature. The house isn't the problem. The sensor was calibrated a long time ago, in different circumstances, and nobody has ever reset it.
Financial anxiety, for a surprising number of people, works exactly the same way.
The financial anxiety that wealth doesn't fix
The assumption runs deep: worry about money is what happens when you don't have enough of it. Build the portfolio, pay down the mortgage, hit the number you've been aiming at for twenty years, and the alarm goes quiet. It's a reasonable theory. The evidence doesn't support it.
In 2024, Arbuthnot Latham surveyed more than 500 UK residents with investable assets of at least £100,000. Four out of five reported feeling regularly stressed or worried about their finances. Among those with a net worth above £500,000, the figure was 82%. These aren't people on the edge of financial difficulty. They're among the most financially secure in the country.
The alarm keeps going off regardless of what's in the house.
Research also suggests something striking about how high earners perceive their own position. People who are objectively among the top earners in the UK tend not to see themselves that way. Many place themselves somewhere in the middle, part of a vague, financially pressured majority, despite the numbers telling a different story.
Dylan Ellis has watched this pattern play out across a decade of client work. "Some people will overspend to make them feel good," he says. "Some people will save every penny because they're scared of it running out." Both responses show up right across the income spectrum. The compulsive spender and the white-knuckled saver aren't separated by their bank balances. They're separated by something less visible, and far less easy to fix by accumulating more.
Why money doesn't switch the worry off
More money doesn't fix the alarm because the alarm was never really about money. It was set earlier, in circumstances that had nothing to do with investment portfolios or pension pots.
Psychologists use the term "money scripts" to describe the beliefs about money formed in childhood that shape financial behaviour in adulthood. They're not conscious positions. They're absorbed from the texture of family life: the conversations that stopped when a child walked into the room, the weeks when the mood in the house shifted before payday, the unspoken rules about what could and couldn't be asked for. By the time someone is earning well and paying into a pension, those scripts are already decades old. The bank balance changes. The script doesn't.
People who grew up in households where money was scarce often carry a particular version of this. Research suggests they stay hyper-vigilant about finances long after achieving genuine security, still braced for a floor that never falls away. No amount of additional security measures stops the sensor from triggering, because it wasn't calibrated for the life they're living now.
Dylan understands this from the inside. His own experience of financial scarcity in childhood shaped not just his empathy but his entire approach as a planner. "I don't believe I have a right to talk to anyone about their money until I understand them and what makes them work," he says.
That's a different starting point from most financial conversations, which begin with figures, products, and allocations. Dylan begins somewhere else: with the person, and with what shaped them.
"I wish my family had that when we were young," he says. "Just someone to sit us down and give us some direction would've gone a million miles."
The sensor needs someone who understands how it was originally set. More locks won't help.
What this costs when the worry follows people to work
The alarm doesn't stay at home. It travels into the commute, into the morning meeting, into the decisions that need making by lunchtime.
For employers, the cost is measurable. CIPD research found that financial-related absenteeism costs large UK organisations an average of £323,390 a year. Deloitte's 2024 research put the total cost of poor mental health to UK employers at £51 billion annually, with presenteeism, people present but not performing, the single largest component at around £24 billion.
And the idea that this is mainly a problem among lower-paid staff doesn't hold up. Research suggests money worries affect the performance of employees earning well above average salaries. The nature of the anxiety may differ. The drag on focus and output doesn't.
"Millions of hours are lost every year due to financial stress," Dylan says, "whether that's people taking time off, or sitting at their desks while their minds are somewhere else entirely."
Most employers are paying that cost without knowing it. The connection between a distracted employee and a money worry they've never mentioned isn't obvious. But the cost shows up all the same.
Treating the cause, not the symptoms
Most employers who've done something about financial stress have reached for the nearest available tool: an employee assistance programme, a financial education webinar, a wellness app with a budgeting feature. These aren't worthless. But they treat the alarm as a noise problem rather than a calibration problem. Turn down the volume, and the underlying sensor stays exactly as it was.
Generic financial information addresses knowledge. A financial plan addresses behaviour. And it's behaviour, not knowledge, where the real cost sits. Most people experiencing financial anxiety already know, in the abstract, what good financial decision-making looks like. The gap is between knowing and doing. A leaflet can't close it.
Vanguard's UK research into what it calls Adviser's Alpha, its measure of the additional value a good financial planner provides, found that the single largest component isn't investment selection or asset allocation. It's behavioural coaching: helping people stay steady, make consistent decisions, and stick to a plan when instinct pulls in the opposite direction.
Dylan puts the business case plainly. "If you implement financial planning as a workplace benefit, free access, you will get more productivity out of your employees, fewer absences," he says. "But you're also taking care of the people who work for you and drive your business forward."
One approach addresses the symptom. The other addresses the cause.
What working with Dylan actually looks like
Dylan doesn't begin with a portfolio review. He begins with a question: "What is important to you? What's all this money for?"
For many people, nobody has ever asked them that. They've accumulated, planned, saved, invested, and worried, without ever quite pinning down what they were doing it for.
Dylan works with businesses across Chelmsford and Essex, embedding himself as a financial planning resource for staff at every level. There's no cost to the employee at the point of use. He starts with the business owner, then extends that access through the workforce. The scope is deliberately broad. "For some people that's understanding their payslip better," he says. "For other people it's full financial planning and retiring early, or just making sure they can take their holidays every year without worrying." Same service. Different starting points.
What it isn't is product selection dressed up as planning. No opening conversation about fund choices before anyone has established what the money is for. The evidence-based investment approach follows from the plan, not the other way around.
Because rockwealth charges fixed fees rather than a percentage of assets under management, Dylan's income doesn't depend on the size of anyone's portfolio. That removes a structural pressure that quietly distorts a lot of financial advice. "If you're not doing holistic financial planning," he says, "the only way you can prove your worth is by being seen to be doing something." Fixed fees take that pressure off entirely.
This is what recalibration looks like in practice. Not new locks. Not additional security lighting. Someone who takes the time to understand how the sensor was originally set, and what it would take for it to feel safe in the life the client is actually living.
The alarm that goes off at 3am, in a house that is entirely secure, in a life that is genuinely going well, can be reset. It just needs someone who knows where to start.
Start with a conversation
The initial conversation with Dylan costs nothing and commits you to nothing. Whether you're a business owner thinking about your workforce, a director with your own financial picture to untangle, or an individual looking for clarity, the first step is a conversation.
Dylan works with clients across Chelmsford and the wider Essex area.
You can read more about Dylan's background and approach and how fixed-fee financial planning works. To make an appointment, call us on 01245 415979, or click on "Book a call" and answer a few simple questions. It will only take two minutes.
