I shared an article from the ESRI last week that was in the Irish Independent and it covered what to do and more specifically what not to do in terms of financial planning.
Because as we get into the workforce and start to take out a financial commitment such as car loans and mortgages and perhaps have a family, these are very long-term commitments financially yet most of us haven’t been taught or really been given any information in terms of how to manage our money over the course of our lifetime and be able to pay for all this.
So between the ESRI findings and my own learnings. I’ll share some habits you should consider when financial planning.
The first thing is very simple, don’t spend everything that you earn, it saves the difference and that disposable income that you save will be used for your financial planning.
Create a habit of saving on a regular basis and any saving that you want to do over the long term, over 5 years I would look to invest it and see if you can get it at a higher return.
If you are looking to invest money I would talk to an adviser just to get a good idea of the risk that you’re potentially taking on.
Be as tax efficient as possible so if you’re looking at very long-term savings could you be getting a tax break on a pension or could you be paying for your life or your illness cover on a policy that has a tax break on the premium.
The last is just to map out the next 20, 30, 40 years and that’s going to cover everything over the time frame so that’ll be short, medium and long term and it’ll identify everything that needs to be paid for and then you can start to allocate resources according to that and that’ll be your financial roadmap.