Managing Your Financial Affairs

Successfully Managing Your Financial Affairs
To ensure that we make the best use of our money, and to help us see a financial future that ensures our security, return on investment, and the ability to use our money in the most responsible ways, we need to prepare our plans. Managing your financial affairs is all about thinking about where you want your money to go and what you want it to do in future, and how you’re going to use it to meet your long-term goals. Here, we’re going to look at some of the ways you can ensure you don’t stray too far from those goals.

Know your goals

For a lot of people, the goals for their financial affairs fall somewhere in the vein of wanting to ensure their financial security and independence in the long-term. However, it’s important to get specific with your goals so that you can also get specific with your plans. If you want to improve your investments, then how much will you need to invest? If you want to plan for your retirement or make sure you have enough for any eventual care fees, how much should you have put aside to reliably cover the standards you set? Get to understand the specifics of your goals and make them measurable and attainable.

Don’t go any further without a budget

In order to make the best use of your money, you need to be mindful of how you spend your money. If you’re a high earner or you have worked your way up to increase your earnings in your forties or fifties, then it’s easy to spend more money than you need to. But the money that you are throwing away on unnecessary expenses could have already helped you towards your goals. Start a budget, planning out all of your expenses, including the necessary, the discretionary, and those that are designed to help you towards your financial goals. This way you can make sure that every time your income comes in, you know exactly how much you’re going to put towards your financial affairs and how much you will spend on daily needs and wants.

Consider individual and family needs

Taking care of your own needs, such as your investment income, retirement fund, and potential care costs are obviously important. But if you also want to leave money to your family members and dependants, you need to set aside money for them as well. Aside from making sure that they are covered by a will or by life insurance, you should start looking into how to manage estate taxes, as well. You want to make sure that your family gets as much of what you set aside as possible.

Don’t go it alone

You may be able to have certainty about what goals you want to hit, but to make sure that you’re really taking the steps that you need to meet them, and to make sure you’re properly accounting for the costs of managing your financial affairs, you should ensure that you have a professional on your side. Financial planning experts can help personalise a range of financial solutions, such as savings, retirement funds, and investment services, to meet the specific financial needs of an individual. As such, rather than picking out whichever financial services you first like the sound of, you can rely on the advice of an expert who knows the market better than you do, and can apply your goals and needs to those choices.

Be sure to protect yourself

As we get older, we find that there are more financial risks that we have to deal with. We may have not only growing children to take care of but, as we reach our forties and fifties, we may be concerned about aging parents as well. If an emergency arises for any of them, you may need to ensure you have the financial ability to lend the aid that they need. It’s wise to do a protection audit in advance, ensuring you have emergency funds at the ready so that you can account for those unforeseen events without them interruption your financial affair planning too much.

To ensure that you are successfully managing your financial affairs for the future, you need to know what kind of future, exactly, you are planning for. What are the goals that will help you reach those longer objectives and, preferably with the help of a professional, what steps must you take to reach them?

Use the enquiry form on our website to send us a quick message or enquire about the services that Gale and Phillipson provide. We’ll make sure you get to speak to a practical and experienced local financial adviser best suited to your needs.