Adam Simmons was earning £950,000 a year as a stockbroker, flying first class to Australia, the Philippines and Thailand, and keeping an Aston Martin and a Bentley on the driveway of his seven-bedroom home in Loughton, Essex. At 49, he was made redundant, and within months his marriage had collapsed too.
Now 58, he pays himself £24,000 a year running a home care business in Essex and says he has never felt more fulfilled.
A career built in the City and Tokyo
Simmons began in the City in the late 1980s as a messenger, working his way onto a trading desk and eventually specialising in Japanese equities. He first moved to Tokyo in 2000 and spent 13 years living and working in Japan, running teams for major financial institutions. The family lived rent-free in a luxury apartment, with business class flights home covered and school and nursery fees paid.
At the peak of his career his annual salary stood at £450,000. He arrived at his desk before 7am and rarely left before 6pm. As seniority increased, he says, so did the pressure.
In 2017 he was made redundant and had to return to the UK. The couple moved back into the Loughton home they had kept while abroad, but with income gone and the marriage breaking down that same year, the house had to be sold along with the Bentley.
A dark period
Simmons describes the period that followed as one of the hardest of his life. He was in therapy and, by his own account, uncertain whether he wanted to continue at all.
He set up a trading business to generate income, but when markets moved against him he decided he could not return to finance. A counsellor offered advice that changed his direction: the best form of therapy, he was told, is to go and help people.
Simmons began volunteering, first delivering meals for Jewish Care, a health and social care charity, then moving into telephone befriending, where volunteers speak regularly with people experiencing loneliness. He later volunteered with the Samaritans.
He says the work gave him a sense of worth he had never found in finance. It also pointed him toward a new career.
Investing savings in a care franchise
After months of reading, meeting providers and analysing companies, Simmons invested around £140,000 of his savings into a Radfield Home Care franchise, which allows buyers with upfront capital to set up their own care business. He now runs a home care operation helping vulnerable people across Essex.
The transition was not straightforward. He says it took months of training and regulatory approvals before the business could begin operating, and four years in the role is, by his assessment, more demanding than anything he did in finance.
He takes around £2,000 a month from the business and supplements that with savings. He rents a two-bedroom maisonette in Chigwell, Essex, for £1,600 a month. Foreign holidays have stopped; trips now mean a friend's apartment in Spain or a Parkdean holiday home in the UK.
A different measure of wealth
Simmons is direct about the contrast between his two lives. He says he visited every Michelin-starred restaurant in Hong Kong and London and now prefers local gastropubs. His children once did not know passengers could turn right when boarding a plane because the family always flew first class to the left.
He insists, however, that the satisfaction he gets from his clients and staff is what makes him happy now, and that he was not genuinely happy before despite believing he was.
His advice to anyone considering a major career change later in life is to act on passion rather than caution. Staying in the same role because it feels safe, he says, is how regrets are made.
