Money is personal.
Financial planning
should be too.
Steve's story
Twenty-five years in financial services and one conviction: there had to be a better way.
After working across advice, paraplanning and client service in major national wealth-management businesses and boutique firms, including Evelyn Partners, Chase de Vere, BDO and Quilter, Steve has seen what good financial planning can achieve. He has also seen how easily the industry can make something deeply personal feel unnecessarily complicated.
Too often, conversations about money begin with products, percentages and terminology rather than with the person sitting across the table. Steve sought to do things differently.
Sonder Wealth begins with understanding you: where you are now, what matters to you, and the aspirations you have for the future. Only then does he turn to the numbers.
The aim of Sonder Wealth is to bring the different parts of your financial life together, aim to make the complex understandable and to help give you a clearer understanding of the road ahead.
Sometimes this means investing, sometimes it means protecting what you already have, planning for retirement, helping your family or simply knowing that you’re already in a stronger position than you thought.
That breadth of experience has ranged from complex planning around multi-million-pound business exits to helping individuals and young families put essential financial protection in place.
Good financial planning shouldn’t leave you with more questions than you started with. It should give you clarity.
Steve McNamara Dip PFS
Founder, Sonder Wealth
CII qualified · Advanced qualifications in Pension Transfers and Safeguarded Benefits · Long-Term Care specialist licence
Corbel Partners
Sonder Wealth is deliberately personal as you work directly with them to receive advice shaped around your circumstances, rather than being guided into a predetermined solution.
Sonder Wealth operates as an Appointed Representative of Corbel Partners, an independent FCA‑regulated firm. This arrangement allows Steve to provide personalised, independent financial advice while benefiting from the professional support and oversight of an established organisation.
Corbel supports Sonder Wealth with specialist paraplanning, compliance and technical research. This ensures your planning is backed by thorough analysis and appropriate regulatory review, while we remain free to recommend solutions from across the market.
For clients, it creates a simple balance: a direct relationship with your Planner, supported behind the scenes by experienced technical and compliance teams.
Corbel has also been recognised within the FT Adviser Top 100 for five consecutive years, from 2022 to 2026, reinforcing the strength of the organisation Steve has deliberately chosen to work alongside.
Their wider team includes a dedicated paraplanning function that supports the research and preparation behind client recommendations, helping ensure advice is thoroughly considered, documented and compliant.
In practice, this allows Sonder Wealth to concentrate on what matters most: understanding you, asking the right questions and building a plan around your life, while drawing on specialist technical and regulatory support behind the scenes.
One-to-one financial planning, backed by specialist research, paraplanning and regulatory support.
What does wealth mean to you?
Wealth is about more than the value of your investments.
It might mean:
• Having the freedom to stop working earlier
• Knowing your family will be secure
• Supporting your children
• Starting or growing a business
• Travelling and creating new experiences
• More choice over how you spend your time
• Simply feeling more confident and reassured
The reality is that wealth means something different to everyone.
That's why financial planning at Sonder Wealth begins with your life, not your portfolio. Once we understand what matters most to you, we can build a financial plan designed to support it.
FAQs
Steve McNamara is the founder of Sonder Wealth and has 25 years of experience in financial services. He created Sonder Wealth to offer a more personal, clear and human approach to financial planning, beginning with the individual rather than with a product or investment.
Sonder Wealth is built around understanding the person first. Rather than beginning with products, percentages or predetermined solutions. Sonder Wealth starts by understanding your circumstances, priorities and what your goals are. The aim is to help make financial planning clearer, more personal and easier to understand.
Independent financial advice means that recommendations are not restricted to products from one provider or a limited panel but from the whole of the market. This allows an independent financial planner to consider suitable solutions from across the relevant market when making recommendations based on a client’s individual circumstances
After working in financial services for 25 years, Steve wanted to create an approach that felt less complicated and more personal. Sonder Wealth was designed around clarity, transparent communication and financial planning that begins with a client’s life, rather than with a financial product.