How working with a financial planner can help you to make sensible financial decisions

Working with a financial planner offers you a whole host of benefits. By partnering with us at Britannic Place, you can be confident that your wealth is both sufficient and suitably organised for whatever you want to use it for.

Alongside these powerful advantages, we can also help you make more sensible financial decisions, something that many people – particularly those approaching retirement – tend to struggle with.

According to figures published in IFA Magazine, nearly one-third of UK retirees said they would make different financial decisions if they had the chance to start the retirement process again.

These figures underline the importance of making the right choices first time round, and there’s perhaps no better way to do so than by working with a financial planner.

So, find out how working with us can help to ensure that you make the right financial decisions so that you can live the lifestyle you want in retirement.

Using your goals as a starting point

The cornerstone to any financial plan is your goals for the future. By making your money work around the things you really want out of life, you’ll be able to use your wealth to achieve the things that you find most fulfilling.

Crucially, these goals are also vital in helping you to make the most sensible financial decisions. Simply, it’s far more straightforward to make the right choices with your money when you know what you’re working towards.

That’s why the key to making successful financial decisions is setting your goals for the future. These ambitions will be entirely personal to you, but some common options that many retirees tend to plan round include:

• Travelling or going on holidays
• Buying an expensive luxury item, such as jewellery or a piece of designer clothing
• Pursuing a passion, such as working on your painting or playing golf
• Volunteering, giving back to a community that you’ve benefited from throughout your working life
• Spending time with children and grandchildren.

At Britannic Place, we’ll always start by having you work out your goals. In doing so, it can refine the financial decisions you subsequently make.

Showing you all the options and how your choices will affect them

With your goals at the centre of your plans, you can then look at the way your wealth is organised and work out how to best use it to achieve your ambitions.

Of course, this is another key financial decision, as how you decide to use your wealth will have a marked impact on your ability to reach your targets.

For example, the sorts of things you might consider could include:

• Where you save and invest your money, and how to strike a balance between the two
• How and when you access your pension
• The level of risk and reward in your investment portfolio.

Financial advice can be incredibly valuable here, looking at all the different aspects of your money and then showing you the various ways you could use it to work towards those goals.

There is often a huge range of options for how you can do this, each with a slightly different outcome. A planner can model how your choices for each option will affect your lifestyle, giving you detailed information to help you come to the right decision for you.

A sounding board for your ideas before you do anything

Of course, your financial plan is not a fixed, unchangeable document. Rather, it’s a living collection of your wealth, thoughts, and goals that you can make changes and additions to over time as your life changes. This means that you may find yourself making more decisions down the line.

For example, your circumstances might change as you head towards retirement. You might move home, start a new job, or perhaps get divorced or remarried.

In any of these instances, having a financial planner can be extremely useful. It means having someone in your corner looking out for your best interests who can show you what sort of impact any one of these decisions could have on your finances.

They’ll also be a sounding board for your ideas ahead of any choices you make. If you’re considering making changes to your pension or investment portfolio, your planner can show you how this might affect your progress towards your goals, and then offer guidance as to how to proceed in the most sensible way.

Avoiding the common pitfalls that can affect your decisions

One of the most valuable benefits that a financial planner brings to your decision-making is that it can help you to avoid the common pitfalls that can influence your choices.

For example, it’s all too easy to fall victim to things such as:

• Loss aversion, in which losses feel twice as psychologically potent as the pleasure of winning, leading you to avoid losing at all costs.
• Recency bias, believing that conditions are worse in the moment than in the past, simply because it is your most recent experience of difficult circumstances.
• Choice overload, becoming fatigued by the number of decisions you have to make, affecting your judgement and causing you to pick less favourable options.

By working with a financial planner, you can remove the risk of these different elements entirely. When the decisions seem to mount up and it feels like there’s too much to do, your planner can offer a reassuring voice and shoulder some of the burden. That way, you can stay on track to achieve the things you want to without letting choice overload get the better of you.

Meanwhile, if you do experience recency bias or feelings of loss aversion, your planner will be able to explain that your plan is built for longevity.

Markets rise and fall over time, so knowing that your wealth is set up by an expert to achieve the right results for you can offer immense peace of mind, even when conditions or circumstances are difficult.

Speak to us

When you work with us at Britannic Place, we take all these considerations and more into account to design a financial plan that suits you and your personal circumstances.

If you’d like to find out more about how we help you to make informed, incisive financial decisions, please get in touch with us today.

Email info@britannicplace.co.uk or call 01905 419890 to find out more.

Please note

A pension is a long-term investment. The fund value may fluctuate and can go down, which would have an impact on the level of pension benefits available. Your pension income could also be affected by the interest rates at the time you take your benefits.