What is a Life Plan?

Effective financial management goes beyond the monitoring and directing of day-to-day finances. It’s about successful planning for your ideal future. In order to build the life you want, before and after retirement age and the inheritance legacy you wish to pass to the next generation, a strategic approach is essential.

GWM’s Life Plan is designed to give you a clear picture of your financial future. Each plan is completely bespoke and helps you & your financial adviser make informed decisions. For example, a life plan might include targets to improve someone’s wellbeing, including family time, hobbies, holidays, career/business, or retirement.

How does it work?

Wealth management is more than giving advice on where to invest your money.  With the Life Plan, we like to look at and understand your whole financial picture. We want to get to know you and what matters most to you.

All planning relies on present facts together with assumptions about the future, matched against goals and aspirations. The Life Plan starts with a base plan, which helps ensure that normal living standards are sustainable. We then move onto your goals and aspirations, which could range from retirement, funding a property purchase for your children, buying a new car or going on holidays. We can also cover positive cashflows such as the sale of a business, downsizing your property to release equity and so on.

We call these items ‘events’ and they are crucial as they give shape and direction to your Life Plan. In short, the Life Plan projects forwards all income and expenditure, and will show whether you will run out of money. By building in events, whether they are goals or inevitable circumstances, the Life Plan becomes personal and valuable, both as a planning guide and a map to keep you motivated and on track.

Your Life Plan journey with GWM

Define Goals & Objectives

Everyone has unique goals and objectives and we want to learn what those are. Most people have short and long term goals and it is important for us to plan for both.

Evaluate Expenses, Cash Flow & Taxes

We discuss your household expenses and cash flow.  Are you living within your means or do you need to set a budget?  Do you have special tax situations that need to be addressed?  Is saving for college on your radar for your children?  Do you have a special needs or ailing family member that needs to be taken care if something happens to you?

Provide Recommendations

It is not possible to provide advice or recommendations until we truly understand your current financial situation.  Only after we discuss and look at your whole pictures, do we like to provide recommendations that are suitable for you and your family.

Develop & Execute the Plan

We will help you develop a plan. We will also provide the guidance to execute the plan.

Refine & Revise as Needed

We also understand that goals and situations will change and we are here to refine and revise your plan as needed.

What are the benefits of the Life Plan?

The Life Plan is continually evolving and adaptable to your life events.  This will give you a visual understanding of your potential financial future.

One significant benefit of this process is the ability to build in ‘what if’ scenarios. This helps our clients assess options and identify opportunities such as whether retiring 5 years early is viable, whether the client actually needs to downsize property, and also model the potential consequences of long-term care or the impact of a critical illness.

The plan also lets us model different rates of investment return, different price escalations and also to model for the impact of a stock market crash. Sustainability can be achieved by balancing costs/outgoings, assets, specific financial goals, investment returns and tax planning.

Can the Life Plan support my family’s future?

The Life Plan is a great tool for supporting intergenerational wealth. The plan will help clients forecast what they might leave to relatives in later life and supports inheritance planning for managing your family’s financial future.

We recommend that we meet with your family to discuss their future inheritance and potentially put a plan in place for their future.

What are the next steps?

Change can come at any time in your life and can take many forms: receiving an inheritance; selling your business; the arrival of your children or grandchildren; or making the big step into retirement. Whichever situation you find yourself in, it’s important to make the right choices to achieve the best long-term outcomes for everyone.

In all the excitement of opening a new chapter in your life it can be difficult to focus on making financial decisions. That’s why the support of a trusted and experienced Financial Planner is crucial at such times. We help you take stock of your personal and financial situation and move forward in the right direction, confident that you and your loved ones are looked after and provided for.