FINANCE
Helping you plan: from left, Steve Hodgson,
Helen Weatherhead, Sam Tate, Anthony
Long and Paul Adams lead the team at
Vintage Chartered Financial Planners.
What’s your
retirement plan?
H
Sam Tate of Stockton-based Vintage Chartered Financial Planners
provides advice on planning for your financial future.
ave you ever thought about what
you’d like your life to look like in
retirement? How about how you’ll
pay for university fees for your child or buy
that holiday home you’ve often dreamed of?
Chances are you have a vague plan; you’re
putting money in a pension and hoping
that’ll be enough to give you a comfortable
lifestyle come retirement day. As for the
holiday home, well only if there’s some
money left over at the end of it all, perhaps?
But how about looking at things in a
different way? How about understanding
what you’d need to do to achieve those things
and working towards making it happen, or at
least to understand what you’d need to do to
start heading in the right direction?
Just think, if you don’t plan at all it’s
unlikely that you’ll ever achieve what you
hope for. But if you do and you get there,
wouldn’t that be great?
Financial planning is the process of
defining your goals and aspirations, working
out where you are now and then using the
help of a professional financial planner to
bridge the gap between the two. It includes
looking at your plans for retirement,
significant one-off purchases, tax planning
and even what might happen to your money
when you pass away. Your financial planner
can also work with you to help plan for any
unexpected events, so you can have peace of
mind that everything will be OK no matter
what.
The process has many benefits, the most
significant being that having a plan in place
means you’re much more likely to achieve
your goals. What’s more, because you have
a clear view of the ‘bigger picture’ it helps in
fine-tuning any smaller financial decisions to
support you in getting where you’d like to be.
Instead of having a mortgage broker, an
IFA and several self-managed policies with
different providers, everything is brought
together under one administrative hub, so
you only have one point of contact for your
various financial policies.
Lastly, having a plan in place doesn’t mean
that you can’t update it should you change
your mind. In fact, proper planning would
involve regular reviews to make sure that
your plans are still on track.
So, what’s the process?
The first thing to do is to find a good
financial planner. Don’t forget these will be the
people who are looking after your assets for
the long-term, so it should be someone you
can trust and build a great relationship with.
When you meet with your financial planner,
you’ll discuss your current situation, including
reviewing and discussing any assets that you
currently hold. You’ll then talk about what
you’re hoping to achieve. An analysis of your
risk profile will also take place, ensuring that
any recommended investments or policies are
suitable for your capacity for loss and attitude
to risk.
Your planner and their team will then
use a process called cash-flow modelling to
determine your levels of wealth as you move
through different stages of your life, testing
out different scenarios to find out what would
work best and then recommending policies
to fit.
Once underway you’ll meet with your
planner once a year to discuss any changes in
circumstances, check that your plan is on track
and that any investments are performing as
expected. You can then relax in the comfort of
knowing that you’re on track for the financial
future you hoped for.
Vintage are Chartered financial planners. They provide bespoke financial advice to individuals
and business owners using traditional values and are currently celebrating their 30th year in
business. For more details visit vintage-fp.com.
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