Financial Planning in the Middle Ages

Welcome to my Middle Age blogpost. No serfs here and hopefully with sensible financial planning in the early years there are no peasants. Maybe we are not all Lords of the Manor but we may be landowners (or a freeholder in any event). And the only plague like viruses are being killed by our software.

Following their previous informative video on the early years, Morningstar have followed up with the middle years [yes, my title is much better, isn’t it?!]

In this episode they discuss the fact that you're in a stage where you're perhaps coming senior in your job, you have children, you have a house, other responsibilities. You're starting to think a little bit more about coming into retirement and what the future might start to look like.

http://www.morningstar.co.uk/uk/news/articles/106999/Financial-Planning-in-Your-Middle-Years.aspx

Nick Cann, from the Institute of Financial Planning continues “… it's really important to get a handle on where you are in your personal balance sheet. If you’ve been successful, you've looked at your income and expenditure, you started saving monies, you had a variety of strategies I imagine in different areas to invest, and to save in pensions. You have various life insurances and everything there, but it's now starting to get really important to focus that down to a financial plan to understand fully where you are, how likely you are to be able to retire when you'd like to retire or to do other challenges in your life, where there's things around other important aspects of your family, and other areas are also taken care of.

So, middle years is really important to start making sure you really are on track to have the later years in good order. Because you don't all of a sudden want to panic around 55, 60, and think I really haven't got enough. I wish I had done more in earlier years.”

If this sounds like you, have a look at our ‘How much is Enough? page on the website http://www.iangreen.com/timeline.php

Some readers may be thinking surely I could just do this myself, why do I need a financial planner? Well, a few folks can do this themselves. But many of our clients engage us for a financial plan not through lack of capability, but through a lack of capacity (they just don’t have the time to learn how to do it all properly themselves) or through desire (they’d rather not spend their spare time pouring over numbers and graphs).

That said, if you love DIY finances, Go For It!

But in the same way that professional athletes have coaches and many people report greater results at the gym with a personal trainer, why not consider engaging a financial planner to power up your financial plan and make sure your money isn’t going to run out before you do.

Did you know?
The largest Mint in the middle ages was located in the Tower of London

There is an American website with interesting material on it called ‘Get Rich Slowly’ ( http://www.getrichslowly.org/guide-to-money/ ). The middle ages are covered by the middle three of the following list within the early and later years (see previous blog post http://greenfinancial.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/are-you-aged-25-to-50.html )

The stages are:

Plan


Protect


Save


Spend


Invest


Live


Retire

If you need any financial help with any of those stages,
for you or your family,
please get in touch, we’d love to hear from you.