What a Week at Club La Santa Taught Me About Financial Planning

Written by Charlie Martin

Over New Year, I spent a week at Club La Santa in Lanzarote.  

If you haven’t heard of it before, it’s a sports-focused resort built around training, recovery, and long-term performance. People go there to swim, cycle, run, lift, stretch, recover, and then do it again the next day.  

It’s probably not the first place you would think of as a reflection of financial planning, but it is much more similar than you may think. This is because the environment highlights something that we talk about often in financial planning: long-term results are built on small, consistent actions.  

Even though Club La Santa has all the equipment you could dream of and collection of expert trainers, there isn’t one dramatic moment that will transform you.  

There’s no single session that suddenly makes you fitter.  

Instead, progress comes from:  

• Turning up each day  

• Following a structured plan  

• Not overreaching too early  

• Recovering properly  

• Trusting the process  

These same principles directly apply to financial planning.  

Why does this matter?  

In our world, financial progress can feel less visible than physical progress.  

You don’t “feel” your pension growing day to day.  

You don’t see compounding working in real time.  

And because progress is invisible, people are often tempted to chase short-term performance, react emotionally to market headlines or start trying to look for shortcuts. It’s the financial equivalent of doing one extreme workout and expecting lasting results.  

At Club La Santa, if someone tried to sprint every session, skip recovery, and ignore structure, the outcome would be predictable, burnout or injury.  

In financial planning, the equivalent is unnecessary risk, emotional decision-making, or abandoning a long-term plan at exactly the wrong moment.    

What does this mean?  

The week reinforced something simple but powerful.  

Good financial planning is boring in the best possible way.  

It isn’t dramatic. It doesn’t chase headlines. It isn’t built around intensity or quick wins. Instead, it’s structured, deliberate, and designed for endurance.  

Just like training, financial planning works best when the approach fits the individual. The level of risk needs to be appropriate and sustainable. Progress should be reviewed regularly, and any adjustments made carefully, not reactively in response to short-term noise.  

The goal isn’t intensity.  

It’s resilience.  

New Year Resolutions  

Different to what we normally understand when we think about New Year resolutions (bold declarations and big changes), at Club La Santa, the focus felt different. It wasn’t about becoming someone new overnight. It was about turning up consistently, following a plan, and trusting that small, repeated efforts lead to meaningful progress.  

There’s a useful parallel in how we think about money.  

Instead of asking, “What big financial move should I make this year?”, a better question might be, “What small, sustainable actions will compound over the next 10 or 20 years?”  

Because whether it’s fitness or finances, the fundamentals rarely change. Over time, the results tend to take care of themselves.