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Finance

Starting Your Comprehensive Financial Plan

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            What ought to be in your comprehensive financial plan?

Your plan ought to address each of the following areas, preferably in this order, although you will fine-tune it to match your needs:

Return to your goals & take the most important to you at present. Your plan will aim to accomplish these over time. These goals may change in the future as your circumstances change, & as you accomplish them, you will no doubt add more. You can also visit www.finlit.com to get more info.

Your goals

Assumptions & attitudes

Bring together all of your assumptions on how the future may change your plan, using measures like inflation & investment growth. You can also visit finlit to get more info.

Revisit your income sources now, & use the assumptions you made to project forwards each year, calculating how much you will pay in tax & what you will be left with. This will be the basis of the future designs. Don’t forget to include an assumption for how your income producing assets will grow & therefore how the income from these assets will be factored in to your calculations.

Income

Extrapolate how your expenses will change over time as inflation increases costs, & some outgoings change (get paid off or increase for other reasons).

Expenditure

Use your calculations to work out how your assets will grow in value using your assumptions, & also the way you will add to these by saving any excess income in to various investments.

Assets

Liabilities

Work out the way you will reduce your liabilities by paying them off over time, & how this will affect your expenditure.

Emergency funds

You ought to aim to put aside at least 3-6 months worth of expenses in an instant access account.

Defending what you have got

Your next priority ought to be to protect what you have got, ought to the worst happen. This can range from death to serious disease.

Loosely speaking, you ought to pay off debts before you save for the future. Toiling away at this can pay off great dividends at a later stage.

Paying off debt

Saving for the future

One time you have all the basics covered, you can start to save for the future – meeting your goals.