Financial Planning

Financial planning is a way of evaluating your current situation and creating a detailed financial plan, to ensure that you can lead the life you wish to lead, without the risk of running out of money.

We look at the following information, in order to create a financial plan:

• Income
• Current assets
• Pensions
• Investments
• Cash
• Debt
• Property
• Current Expenses
• Future Expenses
• Future Goals

The 6 steps in the financial planning process are as follows:

Financial planning is a service that is becoming crucially important to our clients. Most financial advisors simply sell products to clients. In other words, they act in a transactional manner only. By starting the financial planning process, our clients find the answers to the questions that really matter to them. We know that most people are not really interested in financial products like pensions, annuities, life assurance etc. Instead they really want the answers to the following questions:

• People are living much longer – am I going to outlive my pension fund?
• What age can I retire at?
• How much do I need to be saving to allow me to retire?
• Could I give my son/daughter €50,000 for a deposit on a house?
• Do I need to take additional risk with my pension/investments?
• How much do I need to sell my business for?
• How much income can I draw down each year in retirement?

Financial planning is all about finding answers to the above questions. The system can also incorporate “what if” scenarios e.g. can I afford the cost of long term care should I have to enter a nursing home? We create financial plans for clients that are reviewed and monitored every year to ensure that they are kept up to date and in line with our clients changing goals/needs.

Phil and Les are Certified Financial Planners ® which is an internationally recognized qualification for people providing best practice advice.