Key Personal Financial Planning Parts
Personal financial planning is an exercise an individual or a household performs regularly to manage their income, spending, savings, and investments to attain specific desired goals, including income for daily living now and in the future. This exercise helps you create wealth during your working life and allocate it prudently after you retire and your death. A plan allows you to consider and have a clear view of your financial situation, and with the assessment, you can make a plan. The plan creates a roadmap and discipline, which helps you steer through daily and unforeseen events without wavering until you achieve the goals. The ultimate purpose of financial planning is to develop saving and investment steps to generate financial self-sufficiency in your current and retirement living. Financial planning involves the following main interrelated categories which shape your financial foundation to attain goals and economic sufficiency.
- Vision and Lifestyle.
- Cash flow and debt management (Income and Spending).
- Saving and Investing.
- Tax Planning.
- Risk Management and Insurance Planning.
- Estate Planning.
- Retirement Planning.
Below is an outline of these financial planning areas.
1. Defining Vision and Lifestyle
The starting step in personal planning is to define the kind of life (vision) you want to lead in the short, medium, long term, and retirement. Vision is an imagination of an attractive future status worth striving for. When thinking of a vision, you want to consider areas of your life that could improve. You could focus on career, family, financial and wealth, children or self-education, attitude, character, friendships, public service, enjoyment and relationship with God. You must also have a vision of how you want to live in retirement. You may also want to plan to retire earlier than the average retirement age. You must set short, medium and long-term goals as you create your vision. Personal financial planning is a daunting task, and you should consider involving a professional financial advisor who can help you make an exhaustive financial plan.
2. Cash Flow and Debt Management
Cash flow, which encompasses income and expenditure, is the second step in financial planning. Revenue is the incoming cash and includes salaries, wages, investment dividends, business profits and any regular or foreseen income you earn. Expenditure is the outgoing cash for regular essential things like groceries, mortgage payments or house rent, utility bills and discretionary expenses such as travel, entertainment, shopping and hobbies. When planning for cash flow, you must consider all possible sources of income and how to enhance income to meet essential and discretionary expenditures, including money you need for saving and investing to increase wealth. It would help if you also considered all expenses, including retirement expenses, so you can plan how to prepare for retirement income.
Budgets
Finding income is critical, but handling your expenditures is more crucial. You must ensure your expenditure, including essential and discretionary expenses, and the amounts for saving and investing are equal to or less than your total income. In short, you must balance your cash flow statement. To achieve this control, you must prepare a budget to help you control your income and expenses. A budget is a template allocating income to sub-heads like groceries, mortgage payments or house rent, utility bills and discretionary expenses such as travel, entertainment, shopping and hobbies. You must include in the budget the amounts for saving and investing to achieve the goals of your vision and plan. Included in the budget also are amounts for sorting out chronic personal debts.
An essential principle in personal budgeting is separating net income into five parts: spending, saving, investing, offerings and tithing. In his book "Five Wealth Secrets (2018)", Craig Hill recommends keeping your net income in five jars, each containing 80% net income for spending, 3% for saving, 4% for investing, 3% for offerings and 10% for tithing. Savings are for short-term purposes such as emergencies or buying necessary big-ticket household items. Investing is for medium and long-term goals, such as acquiring income-generating assets such as real estate or shares (stocks). Offerings or Alms money is used to support needy people or noble causes and to support the work of God, such as Sunday service offerings in the case of Christians. Tithe money is strictly for supporting the work of God, as explained in the Bible. All these five categories should have budget lines and amounts in the budget. Savings are usually for short-term purposes, while investing is typically for long-term goals.
You can prepare budgets once you identify the aims for saving and investing the amount required to achieve each expenditure category. You prepare a spending budget containing amounts necessary for meeting current needs and wants, quantities for saving and investing to attain goals and another budget indicating amounts needed for life in retirement. The third budget contains types of assets and values that need to be acquired to generate passive income for living in retirement. Such assets could include a pension, an annuity, company shares, long-term treasury bonds and rental property.
3. Saving and Investing
Saving and investing are the main blocks you use to execute a financial plan and attain goals. You use persistent and consistent saving and investing to create the money to reach goals that require finances to achieve. Saving and investing, therefore, demands careful planning. Saving and investing are closely related as they go hand in hand, but they are independent and somewhat different. At the end of the month, when it is time to decide what to do with the money left over after paying off all the necessary monthly expenses, you typically have two options: save or invest it if it is substantial. Below are some explanations of the meaning of saving and investing.
Saving
Saving has two primary meanings. One meaning is to pay less for your purchases owing to a discount or shopping in a cheaper shop. The other meaning refers to regularly putting cash aside, little by little, in a safe or an interest-bearing instrument like a bank deposit account. Savings are usually short-term in nature with a few weeks or years horizon. One creates savings for several reasons: to meet emergencies, purchase a home, meet college fees, purchase a new vehicle, travel, or accumulate funds for more significant, longer-term and higher-yielding investments. Though saving is for short-term needs and a means of avoiding erosion of value by inflation, savings precede and form the foundation for investing in more significant portfolios that bring higher returns.
Investing
On the other hand, investing uses money or savings to buy an asset you think will be safe and generate an acceptable return over time, making you wealthier each year. Unless you own a substantial amount, saving is the primary way to accumulate money for investing. Under normal circumstances, investment starts only after savings. The term investment means an addition to the stock of physical capital. An investment can include putting money to earn interest, dividends or capital gains over time. The assets include small businesses, fine art, rare wines, gold coins, comic books, stocks, mutual funds, bonds, pension schemes, IRAs, real estate, and antiques. Sound investments are the best way to grow money, riches and wealth, but this can take years due to fluctuating economic conditions.
Saving and investing have several purposes, including creating an emergency fund and a down payment for a big-ticket item like a car or a house, protecting income from inflation, multiplying cash to generate more money and assets and creating income or passive income-generating assets to provide retirement income. The investment market has multiple investment opportunities that vary in safety and income generation. Some are safe but have low returns, while others have inherent high risks but provide higher returns. Still, some have low returns but faster appreciation rates, providing significant capital gains. It can be challenging to identify which assets are safe at the outset, provide reasonable returns, and always align with your goals- risk appetite, needs, budget, and age. Investments need time to achieve the desired income levels, so early starting is advisable. It would help to diversify investments to balance risks and cash flow. To choose wisely, you should enlist the help of a registered financial advisor.
4. Tax planning
Taxes are an obligatory expense that reduces your total income. You cannot avoid taxes but can minimize them with appropriate planning. Various income categories attract different forms of taxes, and the tax authorities change the taxes over time. Therefore, tax planning is critical. Tax planning aims to discover how to accomplish all the other elements of a personal financial plan in the most tax-efficient manner possible without falling foul of the tax law. Most incomes are taxable, but tax planning may uncover income and expenses not subject to tax or methods to avoid or minimize tax liabilities. Tax planning is essential to personal financial planning in order to utilize tax exemptions. Engaging in tax planning allows you to identify areas where certain income generated can avoid tax and expenses, and business losses can be applied to offset tax liabilities.
Furthermore, you can use tax harvesting to reduce tax on retirement income and avoid estate or inheritance tax, saving your estate inheritors a lot of money. Taxation laws are complex and vary from country to country and State to State in the USA. It is, therefore, beneficial to seek expert advice to make the most of tax planning.
5. Risk management and insurance planning
Regular income or income-generating assets can encounter unforeseen risks that can wipe the income or the assets out, leaving you with zero income. Risks can also bring unexpected costs. Risk management is an activity that seeks to protect assets while at the same time multiplying income and involves various insurances. Insurance is an arrangement by which a company or government agency guarantees compensation for specified loss, damage, illness, or death in exchange for periodic premium payment. It is a form of risk management primarily used to hedge against a possible loss.
Insurance is a popular tool for wealth management. Insurance schemes have favourable tax treatments and are tax-effective for inheritance, estate succession planning, and asset management. Life insurance and assurance policies are investments because you pay small amounts over a period, and your family gets a higher sum upon death.
Insurance is essential for personal financial planning because of the risk of losing one's life, assets, legal claims, and illness that may derail one's economic plans. Therefore, taking insurance covers is part of good personal financial planning to guard against total loss of assets and income that can ruin financial planning. The first step in insurance matters is to determine insurance needs. Typical protection methods include:
- Property or damage insurance: This type includes automobile and property insurance. Automobile insurance covers third-party liability in case of a motor accident where you are at fault and there are claims against you. Property insurance protects against property loss through fire or other damage. You may require separate insurance coverage for the personal household or any other items destroyed along with the property.
- Life assurance: This insurance covers income loss due to the sudden death of a breadwinner. You can combine it with long-term disability insurance, which replaces lost earnings when someone is unable to work due to an accident or illness.
- Health insurance: Health insurance covers various medical requirements that arise occasionally and require large sums.
6. Estate planning
Estate planning defines how you want ownership, management and preservation of your assets and how you want them disbursed after your death. The plan also identifies the person who will look after your estate. It prepares you for managing your assets in your lifetime and after death. Assets include your car, home, other real estate property, bank account balances, investments, life assurance, pensions, furniture and personal belongings. If they exist, debts are all part of one's estate. Estate planning is for everybody, not just the wealthy or the old, for the time of departure from this earth does not follow age. Friends and relatives can spend a lifetime and savings battling over your assets if an appropriate estate plan is lacking.
It can be daunting to prepare an estate plan. Still, ensuring your assets end up where you want without interference from the tax and probate authorities or other third parties is necessary. Other estate planning tasks include creating a Will, a Corporation, a Limited Liability Company, a Limited Liability Partnership, limiting tax exposure by creating a Living Trust in the name of beneficiaries, and establishing a Guardian for minor living dependents. It also involves naming an estate executor to oversee the terms of the Will, creating and updating beneficiaries on plans such as Life assurance, setting up durable Power of Attorney to direct asset investments, and making funeral arrangements.
The main point is that estate planning is part of good personal financial planning. It avoids fights that can waste wealth and unnecessary taxes upon the demise of the owner of the wealth. Therefore, estate planning involves drawing a Will and avoiding the above wasteful events that can take a big chunk of a person's wealth upon his demise. To prevent mistakes, you should prepare the Will with the help of experts under no duress and with a sober mind. An estate plan needs regular reviewing and updating as the family and financial situations and laws change over the planner's lifetime.
7. Retirement planning
Retirement is a crucial part of personal financial planning. Your age and health may prevent you from working to create income, yet you need money for food, medicine, and other daily needs. Additionally, old-age work opportunities are rare. Retirement planning helps you to create income-generating assets to finance your retirement needs and be self-sufficient.
Retirement planning includes choosing from several retirement income-building instruments or assets like the IRA, 401k, Health Savings Account (HSA), annuities, and pension plans. Building these assets takes time, and you must start saving and investing early to acquire them. When planning, you need to consider various factors such as returns, investment fees, and tax advantages of each instrument and how you manage and access the funds at the end. You must prepare a forecast retirement expenses budget to target acquiring assets that will generate the income needed for retirement. Retirement planning is a complex activity, and it is advisable to involve a financial advisor.
These are excerpts from the book entitled Personal Financial and Retirement Planning, available at Nuria Bookstore and https://www.amazon.com/author/aggrey.jonathan.bett.