Financial Planning For Your Family's Future

Many of us tend to live from ‘day to day’ and ‘month to month’ when it comes to managing our finances. However, when we get married or have a partner and have children, the sheer speed at which life moves on with trying to juggle a career with our family commitments can often cause us to overlook the future.

However, in order to survive financially and to eliminate increased financial pressures (or, at least, to keep them to a minimum), it’s important that we make some financial plans for both now and the future.

Many couples are simply too pre-occupied with managing financially on a month by month basis or are too concerned with living in the here and now and often take the approach that they’ll worry about how they’re going to pay for things they buy later. However, this is a dangerous strategy as neglecting financial responsibilities, which can ultimately lead to money problems, is proven to be one of the key reasons for couples ending up in the divorce courts and families being ruined, so it is something we should all be concerned with if we want to feel secure about our family’s future.

Things You Need to Consider

Throughout family life, there are many financial matters which you may need to consider. For example, life assurance policies are crucial to ensure that your family will be provided for financially and will still have a roof over their head in the event that the main, or even sole, breadwinner were to die suddenly. And, if you are both out working, have you considered the cost of childcare and/or nursery?

What about your children’s education? You may wish to send your children to private school and may have aspirations that one day they will go on to university. If so, you’re going to have to make some kind of provision to cover the cost of both of these.

Then you’ll also want to consider how you’ll be able to manage once you retire. If you’ve been enjoying a comfortable lifestyle throughout your working life, the chances are that you’ll not want to give that up too lightly. Therefore, making private pension arrangements and/or considering other forms of long-term financial investments will be something you’ll want to look closely at if you want to have an enjoyable retirement without having to give up things like foreign holidays and other aspects of ‘life’s little luxuries. Considering your later years, you may also want to make some provision for inheritance tax, possibly even residential care costs too.

On an even more fundamental level, we also need to budget for the here and now and ensure that we’re able to keep financially afloat and not get sucked in to taking out more credit and loan agreements than we can reasonably afford.

The truth is that the area of financial planning does not seem to excite most of us and, therefore, we often put off considering it until it’s too late. Or, we may simply be existing hand to mouth as it is and have little or no provisions by which we can put aside against potential future financial considerations. However, there is always something we can do in order to better plan and secure our family’s future, even if it’s only something small.

The key to this is that couples need to communicate with each other regularly and try to reach some financial goals which suit them both. Once they do that, it’s then worth seeking out an independent financial adviser who can them help them towards achieving those goals or who can advise them on alternative strategies to ensure that they can work towards securing their family’s future.