People tend to panic and worry about their financial security and get overwhelmed by the prospect of tackling it. However, making sure your financial future is secure doesn’t have to be an overwhelming task.
In this contributed post, here are some tips to help you on your way to protecting yours and your families' security:
Think About The Three P’s
1. Speak To A Professional
Most people will automatically think about speaking to a professional when it comes to things such as legal matters and your health, but sometimes you may not, when it comes to life insurance or financial security. Speaking to a financial specialist will help you to sort through all your opinions and set up a plan for you to achieve both your short-term and long-term goals. (Return to the Main Website & hit the Schedule Button at the top of this website so we can talk!)
2. Be Prepared
Although you may be in doubt, you can plan for the unexpected. Having a strong financial plan, that includes the use of retirement calculators, life insurance, and an emergency fund all help you to be prepared and give you peace of mind.
3. Don’t Procrastinate
It doesn’t matter what your age is or your current financial status, the best time for you to start thinking about the future is the here and now. The plan that put in to place now will be the building blocks for your financial security for you and your family.
4. Plan How You Will Get There
If you don’t know where you are, how will you know where you are going? The first thing you need to do when planning your financial future is to look at your finances today and be honest about it.
Make A List
Any emergency situation can leave you searching for important documents and information. In order to prepare yourself for an emergency, you need to be prepared in advance. Think about creating an emergency plan and make sure you update it regularly. You need to include:
At a minimum keep 3 to 6 months worth of living expenses in a high interest savings account that you can access easily.
A full list of important contact details for medical information for all your family members including allergies, blood type, doctors contact, specialist contacts, etc.
A copy of your life insurance documents and other insurances you may have.
The information about each child’s school address and contact information. Include the information about the adults who are allowed to pick them up.
Think About Insuring Your Families Future
You want your family to be financially secure if something was to happen to you. Think about your situation now, will they be secure at the moment? The best thing you can do is to sort out life insurance and make sure you have the right level of coverage. How long do you have left on your mortgage payments and how much will it cost to raise your children until they are 18? Remember that over time your insurance protection may need to change, for example, if you move to a bigger home with a large mortgage you may want to make sure your coverage is enough to pay off your new mortgage if something was to happen to you.
Think About What Will Happen Once You're Gone
Although no one likes to think about that part of the future, if you don’t a will it’s time to get one sorted. If you die with no will in place, anything you are leaving behind won’t be divided how you wish, or the wishes of your family members, it will be decided for you. It’s best to seek legal advice when writing a will, there is a lot to consider.
As well as a will, you may want to think about using estate planning tools like trusts, term care insurance, and life insurance to help protect your assets. Again, this might be something that you consider getting professional help with.
Look At Your Debt
The fastest but perhaps not the easiest way to feel more financially secure is to eliminate or at
least reduce your debt. Eliminating it is perhaps not realistic, but you should aim to be in full control of it. For example, you could switch from a credit card to using your debit card for a few months to give you some time to pay off some of your cards and not spend what you don’t have.
Pay Your Savings First
Look at your monthly budget to identify how much money you can realistically save and transfer it to a separate account. So you don’t cheat, you should think about arranging for the funds to be transferred as if it was a debit card. You can then use this as a long-term investment or as an emergency fund. Don’t forget that you can adjust your savings amount at any time, if you're having a good month why not up it a little? But, don’t be afraid to drop your allocation if your monthly expenses increase.
Prepare Yourself For Retirement
It's never too early to start thinking about your retirement plans. The first thing you need ot do is think about how much income you are going to need either monthly or annually in order to maintain the lifestyle that you want in retirement. It can be advantageous to speak to an advisor or make use of retirement calculators to figure the ideal figure out.
Three of the main source of your pension include the following:
Employer-sponsored pension plan - These are either fully funded or they are a matched contribution based on your own contribution.
Public pensions - This is a pension that is provided to everyone who is of retirement age and has contributed through employment.
Personal retirement savings- These can help massively when it comes to saving for your retirement future, these are often the savings that help the most so make sure you seriously think about setting one up.
This guide should help you to plan for the future and be financially secure. Have you started to make plans? Please share some of your plans or what you want to implement in the comments below.