What’s Your Freedom Number? The Question Every Recruiter Should Be Able to Answer

61% of higher-rate self-employed taxpayers in the UK are not contributing to a pension (Gilt Edge). In recruitment, that number probably doesn’t surprise anyone — because most high-billing consultants and agency owners have an implicit plan that goes something like: keep billing hard, maybe sell the business one day, and figure out the rest later. Christian Mather, Director and Wealth Planner at One Day Wealth, joined Nitin Sharma on RecTalk to challenge that plan directly. His message: building wealth inside your recruitment business is not the same as building financial freedom. And for most recruiters, the gap between those two things is bigger than they think.

Note: This post is for information and education only. Nothing here constitutes personal financial advice. If you’re thinking about investing or financial planning, speak to a qualified financial adviser who understands your situation.

The Plan That Isn’t Really a Plan

Most successful recruiters have an informal version of a financial plan. It usually involves doing well this year, doing better next year, reinvesting in the business, and eventually — at some unspecified point — having enough to stop if they want to. The business exit sits somewhere in the future as a notional safety net. Maybe a trade sale, maybe a management buyout, maybe just running it down when the time feels right.

The problem with this plan isn’t that exits don’t happen. Some do. It’s that the entire structure is fragile. Your financial future is completely tied to a single asset — the business — which is subject to market conditions, client concentration risk, key person dependency, and the general unpredictability of the recruitment industry. If the market turns, or you burn out, or a key client walks, or you simply want to stop before the exit is ready, there’s nothing else behind it.

Christian’s work with recruitment founders centres on exactly this gap: building personal wealth alongside the business, not just through it. The two things are related but they’re not the same, and treating them as equivalent is one of the most common financial mistakes recruiters make.

The Freedom Number: A Better Goal Than Retirement

Retirement is the wrong frame for most recruiters. It implies stopping, winding down, doing less — and most people in recruitment don’t actually want that. What they want is choice. The freedom to work on what they find meaningful, to take on the clients they actually want, to spend time differently without financial anxiety driving every decision.

Christian’s concept of the Freedom Number reframes this conversation. Your Freedom Number is the amount of invested wealth you need to generate enough passive income to cover your lifestyle without having to earn it. It’s not a retirement fund — it’s an independence fund. The number that means the next deal you do, you do because you want to, not because you have to.

The maths are simple in principle: figure out your annual lifestyle cost, multiply by 25 (using the 4% rule, where withdrawing 4% annually from a diversified portfolio should sustain it indefinitely), and that’s your number. A lifestyle that costs £80,000 a year requires a Freedom Number of roughly £2 million. A lifestyle that costs £50,000 a year requires £1.25 million. The figure is personal, not aspirational — it’s calibrated to what you actually need, not what sounds impressive.

Knowing your number changes how you make financial decisions. It gives you a target you can build towards deliberately, rather than hoping the business will sort it out eventually.

Lifestyle Creep: The Silent Saboteur

One of the patterns Christian sees consistently among high-earning recruiters is lifestyle creep — the gradual expansion of spending to match rising income, which quietly prevents wealth from accumulating. The car gets upgraded when billings hit a new level. The house gets bigger. The holidays get longer. Each individual decision feels earned, because it is. But the net effect is that more income keeps generating more expenditure, and the gap between earning well and building wealth stays stubbornly open.

This isn’t a moral argument against spending money. It’s a mathematical one. Wealth is built from the difference between what you earn and what you spend, compounded over time. If spending rises in lockstep with income, the compounding never gets started. The fix isn’t austerity — it’s intentionality. Deciding, deliberately, what portion of income goes to wealth-building before lifestyle spending absorbs it.

What Recruiters Can Do — Starting From Where They Are

• Calculate your Freedom Number. Work out your annual lifestyle cost, multiply by 25. That’s your target. You don’t have to hit it tomorrow — you just need to know it and start moving towards it.
• Separate business wealth from personal wealth. The business is an asset, not a savings account. Build personal financial structures — ISAs, SIPPs, investment portfolios — that exist independently of what the business is worth.
• Start investing before you feel ready. The most common trap is waiting until there’s “enough” spare cash. Christian’s point is that there’s never a perfect moment, and every year of delay is compounding working against you rather than for you.
• Automate the habit. The most reliable way to build investing consistency is to remove the decision from your monthly workflow. Set a fixed amount to transfer to an investment account on the same day your business pays you, before lifestyle spending can absorb it.
• Diversify away from the business. If your business is your only real asset, you’re not diversified — you’re concentrated in a single, illiquid, sector-specific position. Personal investing is how you spread the risk.
• Talk to a specialist who understands recruitment. Generic financial advice doesn’t account for the specific tax structures, income patterns, and exit dynamics of a recruitment business. A specialist like Christian builds plans that fit the actual shape of a recruiter’s financial life.

Real Talk

The goal isn’t to stop working. It’s to reach the point where stopping is a choice. That’s the Freedom Number. Most recruiters who earn well will never get there if they rely solely on the business to deliver it — because the business is too risky, too illiquid, and too tied to their personal time to count on alone. Build the number alongside it.

This post is inspired by the RecTalk episode with Christian Mather: Wealth for Recruiters: Investing, Freedom Numbers & Financial Security. Watch the full conversation on YouTube. For personalised financial planning, visit One Day Wealth.

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