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Retiring well means planning properly, but that is often easier said than done. Creating a plan means using someone who really understands the financial markets and is in a position to give you the best advice about retirement. However, when you are planning to retire, you need to consider much more than just how much money you have saved away. We look at what needs to go into a strong retirement plan. Your retirement should be a time that you look forward to and plan for most of your working life. Regardless of what job you do, and how much you enjoy it, you should always look forward to finishing with it. Someone once said, “retirement is not the end of the road; it is the start of the open highway” and you should remember that. But in order to embrace that highway, your plan has to be long term, and it needs to consider many aspects of your financial life. Let’s look at what a good plan should like, and what it should include. Establish your goals. There is no point in starting off a plan if you haven’t decided what you want to get out of it, and it doesn’t just have to be one thing, like to retire comfortably. Throughout your working life, you will want to do other things and have major purchases such as property, and will probably want to start a family and those are both major spends. Your plan should build the capacity to be able to afford those in. Work out your assets. You need to establish the assets that you have now and build in what you hope to attain in the future. Obviously, if you are just starting out in your working life, you won’t have much in the way of assets but as you progress through life, your asset list will grow. Your plan is a living thing, and you need to update it regularly so that when you take on new assets, they get added. The adding of assets doesn’t just apply to physical things either; if you start or take out any kind of financial instruments such as a pension or other investment, then you need to add it to your plan as it will yield usable finances at some point in the future. The same thing goes for any expensive collectable purchases – such as painting, books, jewellery etc – that may have a substantial value to them in later years. Add these to your plan too. Review it regularly. You should review your plan at least once a year and certainly update it as your circumstances change. Significant changes might be the change of job, marriage, a new baby, taking on a property, or starting a new investment. If you do any of those things, you should update your plan as quickly as possible. You should also update your ‘route plan’ every year and establish how well it is aligning with your actual goals. The beauty of doing this regularly lets you understand if you are achieving your current route and whether any modifications need to be made to get it back on track. Establish how to change your route. If it looks like you are starting to deviate significantly from your chosen route, you may need to add more investment to get it back where you want it. By reviewing your plan regularly, you will soon start to see if you are in danger of missing your goals and be in a better position to do something about it. Of course, how well your plan is managed will depend heavily on the financial advisor that you appoint to oversee it. So, finding the right person to run your plan becomes the first task, even before you start to think about where you want to finally end up financially. You can find a financial advisor by carrying out a search on the internet, by simply putting in your location alongside the term ‘financial advisor’. This will give you a list of potential companies that will be able to help you. Searching for a “retirement planning Derby” will help you narrow down a company that can help you construct and maintain a strong financial plan that will see you through to your retirement. If you retire with a good plan behind you, it is more likely that you will be in a position to really enjoy it, rather than having to struggle. And no one wants to struggle when they can ill-afford to.

Financial advice isn’t straightforward, so you need to ensure that you find the right advisor for your needs and to create a plan that can see you right through your career and beyond. But finding the right financial advisor in a city like Stafford can be a problem, but is ultimately worthwhile. Finding the right financial advice can be a difficult business. For a start, you need to know what type of advice you might need, but that is dependent upon your circumstances. If you are just starting your working life then your needs will be different than if you are halfway through it or even approaching a time when you expect to be retiring. All of these instances mean that you may have different needs, and will certainly have different amounts of money to invest. Let’s have a look at a few typical scenarios. The early Entry Investor. This is someone who is a recent entry to the job market and may have only been out of education – be it mainstream or higher education – for just a few months or years as a maximum. They will be looking at completing as much as fifty-five to sixty years of work and don’t really have any idea of what life is going to bring them. Of course, they may have aspirations and could have already decided that they want certain material things from life, but don’t yet have any of those in reality. The early-entry investor probably also doesn’t have a great amount of spare salary to invest but is in the enviable position of having plenty of time to actually put money aside throughout their working life, and can start to create a credible financial plan that will have gaols several years or decades in advance. An early entry investor may have time on their side, but they are less sure of how their working life is going to pan out. Mid-career investor. By this point in your career, you are well aware of what you already have, and how your career – pending any unforeseen issues such as redundancy or long-term health issues – is likely to pan out. You will be aware of potential pension growth and what investments you have. You should, by this time in life, have made decisions about children and while you might still be able to move up in the property world, you are likely to have some form of property behind you as a major investment. Even if you are just starting out on a financial plan at this stage, you will still have a State pension in place and private company pensions started, so creating a plan that includes these are easy. All you need is a good financial advisor to help construct the plan. Later-life investor. You could be towards the end of your career, but even this isn’t too late to start a credible plan to see you in to your retirement. Many of the issues that impact the mid-career invest apply to the later-life investor, only they are likely to have a much better idea of what assets they have and how they are progressing. As a later-life investor, you are more likely to be in your final home, and may even have completely paid off your mortgage. Your overall debt is likely to be much smaller than with the two previous groups, with the intention of paying it off before you finally retire. At this point, you will know if your earliest retirement age is possible or whether you will have to work on it for a few years to meet your goals. This mix of potential planning stages have their own advantages and disadvantages, but all of them can be positive with the right financial advisor. Search for a financial advisor in Stafford by either carrying out an internet search for local advisors or maybe even looking in your local newspapers. Both of these will yield results with the best companies around, enabling you to get a strong plan in place that will see you throughout your working life and beyond.