Financial Planner
Turcan and Connell

Norman D

00:02 My name is Norman D I’m a financial planner at a legal firm called Turcan and Connell.

00:08 It’s predominantly giving financial advice to individuals, trusts and smaller charities. Well I’m a chartered financial planner and a certified financial planner and in the UK they are the two top qualifications you can have for that job.

00:23 Quite a contented child I think so I wasn’t very rebellious so I enjoyed school, I had some good friends there. I’m a, for better or worse a numbers person. My dad was actually a maths teacher but I don’t think he would consider himself a mathematician or a numbers person but I thought it was normal for 8 year olds to ask their parents to give them sums to do in the evening. It turns out that’s not normal, I didn’t realise that at the time. So it was really quite natural for me that I would go to University it seemed natural to go and do maths, that was the thing I was best at and enjoyed most so that was a major decision really at that time.

01:02 I got moved forward a year because my parents felt that I was not developing at the rate that I could and after some negotiation with the council it was agreed that I could move up a year. Some how it didn’t really bother me I, the only real memory of that was starting secondary school and people coming up to me in the corridor at school and going ‘are you the boy that’s 10?’ and going ‘yeah, yeah that’s, that’s me yes.’ It’s hard when you’re at school if you stick out a bit because you’re different for whatever reason and so I stuck out for the reason that I was 10 you know. In the last sort of year or so a lot of my friends then they could drive, they could go to the pub and I was 16, that was the only time that I felt, I felt different.

01:52 My family and I agreed that it would be best for me to take that year out and actually come back and just be a bit older, the same age as everyone else when I went to University. I was lucky that I have family in Australia and went to live with them for quite a bit of that year and then came back and started my undergraduate degree back here in Edinburgh. I really feel that I did a lot of growing up in that year just the experience of being away from home.

02:19 I guess you would say I was a motorsport fan but rather than just sort of watching and observing it actually meant I got to take part in that they managed to practice a very, very modest little Fiesta racing car that I raced here in Scotland and north, northern England. That was my dad and I as a two person race team if you want to call it that. So we struggled a bit technically, it was hard work again and a lot of down days but essentially a dream, probably a dream that I didn’t know I had because I didn’t know it was a dream I could achieve and then one day I thought actually I thought right I’d quite like to have a shot at that why don’t I go and do that and 3 weeks later I was sat in a race car with the seat belts wrongly connected because no one had shown me how to do it driving round the track. Did I win anything no. I then got made redundant, I’d seen a lot of people be made redundant and it virtually all of them a year later were happier than the day before they lost their job. I actually think I’m a bit of a people person for all my nerdy maths tendencies I like people and what I wanted was a job where I was more involved with the end individual and really that was when I decided to become a financial advisor, the job I do today. I’m very happy with how my life’s worked out but I’ve not had a grand life plan I think what I’ve done is make decisions at certain points in time and I’ve gone along and sort of worked my way out the branches of a tree if you want but I don’t, I haven’t done from the start, which branch I was going to end up on at the end.