DAY 5 – Financial Planning Week 2012

Financial Planning Week aims to raise awareness of the importance of financial planning. In my series of blogs I have given some ideas of the things that can be done to help people achieve their financial goals….

On day 1 I raised awareness of what was the real point of money and that in order to achieve your financial goals you’ll need a budget (day 2). The four rules of budgeting were on day 3 and once a healthy budget is esablished the differeing roles that savings and investments play in a financial plan need to be known (Day 4).

The role of the financial planner in all this is simple (not easy). It is to take a pre-planning simplistic view of the world, apply the skills, knowledge and expertise to what is in fact an extremely complex situation and present it in an elegantly simple form so that the outcomes are clear. You don’t need to understand the physics of flying or be a fully qualified pilot to appreciate the benefits of flying.

Picture Credit: Carl Richards (http://www.behaviourgap.com)

So what’s the point of Financial Planning Week for me? Easy. To decrease the time between someone realising they need to take action and them actually doing something about it. Albert Einstein described insanity as doing the same thing and expecting a different result. To achieve something different do something different.

Don’t delay. Life is not a rehearsal. The time you’ve spend reading this post you’ll never get back. But perhaps it’ll be a few minutes that’ll make a real difference…

Day 1: I’m going to start by challenging your view of money (if you have one).
Day 2: I’ll explain why budgeting is essential and how it will help.
Day 3: I’ll give you four simple rules to follow to create spare money in your life.
Day 4: I’ll explain the difference between savings and investments and what they’re for.