Financial planning can mean different things to different people. A bespoke financial plan created by an INDEPENDENT FINANCIAL PLANNER can be a very valuable asset.

In the simplest form, it’s about budgeting and ensuring that income exceeds or matches the expenditure. Planning for school fees, retirement, large purchases such as houses or cars can also form part of a more complex plan. These days, more and more parents are looking to help their children on to the housing ladder so we look to incorporate this into some of our plans.

Many clients come to us with pensions, ISAs and savings knowing they are all good vehicles to save for their retirement. We assess these assets altogether, put them into a targeted plan, and build a cashflow model to project how those assets can support our clients going forward. We conduct a thorough factfinding process to establish exactly what assets a client has, what their aims and objectives are and then put that plan together.

This can be quite an exciting moment, as for many years savings have been made without a targeted outcome but when these are put into context we have much more meaningful conversations (“So if I saved this much more I could retire a few years earlier?”).

Saving can be boring if you do not know where it is taking you, if you have an idea of your destination and time of arrival it then becomes much more interesting.