Essential needs, lifestyle wants and legacy aspirations
When it comes to planning for your financial future, a roadmap can be an extremely helpful tool. By outlining your current situation and mapping out where you want to be, you can develop a clear plan of action that will help you achieve your financial goals.
Current situation
It’s important to set specific financial goals. What do you hope to achieve? Do you want to save for retirement? Generate investments that will provide you with an income, growth or both? Build up an emergency fund? Once you have a clear idea of your goals, you can start to develop a plan to achieve them.
Creating a financial roadmap can be an extremely helpful tool in planning for your future. By outlining your current situation and mapping out where you want to be, you can develop a clear plan of action that will help you achieve your financial goals.
Different goals
Goal-based financial planning will help you invest in a systematic and disciplined manner to achieve your goals. It also enables you to remain focused and unaffected by short-term volatility in markets.
Although people may have very different goals depending on what life stage they are at, their goals can be broadly categorised into essential needs, lifestyle wants and legacy aspirations.
Financial success
Planning for financial success in each of these areas can be complicated in today’s world. A broad knowledge of everything from complex retirement and investment products to risk management strategies and tax laws is required.
Your financial roadmap should provide you with clarity about your future. It should detail every aspect of your vision – your hopes, fears and goals. It should also describe exactly how your future will look and help you to know exactly where you are headed and when you are likely to arrive.
Take some time and ask yourself these questions:
Can I sleep comfortably knowing I’ll have enough money for my future?
Do I have the security of knowing where I’m heading financially?
Am I going to be able to maintain my current lifestyle once I stop working?
Do I feel empowered financially to live the life I want today and tomorrow?
Have I made sufficient financial plans to live the life I want and not run out of money?
Do I have a complete understanding of my financial position?
What is ‘my number’ to make my current and future lifestyle secure?
Future lifestyle
Initially, you need to identify the goal for which you wish to invest and assess the time you have to reach it. Once that is done, it is important to find how much the goal costs today. Add a reasonable amount of inflation to that, and then you would know what the goal would cost you in the year you wish to accomplish it.
This process requires you to understand ‘your number’ – in other words, the amount of money you’ll ultimately need to ensure complete peace of mind in knowing your future lifestyle is secure and making sure you don’t run out of money before you run out of life.
Your financial roadmap will enable you to make the right financial choices and get the balance right between current responsibilities and future aspirations. All of this should be designed in a way so that you can achieve your desired lifestyle goals and objectives reliably over time.
