What is lifestyle financial planning?

Lifestyle financial planning is a new approach to personal financial planning.

It’s not about selling you financial products like pensions and insurance but helping you get the life you really want. The aim is to help you gain control and master money.

This style of financial planning is both logical and emotional. The planner will dig deeper into your life and explore your relationship with money. The process challenges your relationship with money and helps you establish your personal goals.

It is important that the planner gets to know you and helps you identify what’s REALLY important. You will explore the things you want to achieve in your lifetime and define the lifestyle you want to enjoy both now and later in life.

The second stage is pulling together your numbers and doing some number crunching to produce a lifetime cashflow forecast.  This will give you a picture of your financial life based on your current expenditure.

Once you have this baseline you can play with the numbers and look at different outcomes from different expenditure choices.

The next stage is implementation where you do different things with money. This can include changing, buying and/or existing from financial products such as investment plans and insurance policies. It may also mean changing your financial habits – perhaps cutting back on some entertainment expenditure.

Finally, there is review. This is where budgets are set and reviewed. Reviewing your plan regularly connects your daily behaviour to your life goals.

When done well your life will change and so will your relationship with money.

Like any good plan it is adaptable and can be tweaked, like a ship readjusting the wheel to stay on course whilst the wind and sea constantly affect the ship. You’re your own captain of your financial ship…in control with a map.

So, will this style of planning benefit you?

It depends. Some people are not ready to face the reality of their situation. Others know they need to review their behaviour and welcome having someone hold their hand.

At Sackmans we like the saying “If you want your dreams to come true you need to wake up”. A dream needs a plan and a plan needs to be realistic, have specific targets and be reviewed.

The process usually takes 12 weeks. This gives you some mind time and means proper research can be done.