Why not make a resolution to look at your life and financial planning – a resolution that will pay you dividends for the weeks, months and years ahead.Don’t know where to start? Life Academy has launched a financial life plan template that can be adapted to suit everyone, irrespective of wealth or background. It will help encourage individuals to take responsibility for their own financial wellbeing and long-term security.
The financial life plan template provides a checklist broken down into six life stages from birth to later older age of self interrogating questions to help people consider what they should be planning for, what they need to know and who can help them. The template can also be used as a guide by educators and advisors to help their clients.
The financial life plan for each stage of life was developed as a result of research undertaken by Life Academy and Standard Life and published last month. The research report title: Everyone needs a plan demonstrates that attitudes towards saving have changed over the past 50 years. The older generation passed through life with little access to credit or sophisticated financial products. Society postwar valued thriftiness and people needed to save before making a purchase.The younger generation has known nothing but the consumer society:a ‘buy now’ attitude; easy credit; ready acceptance of debt; no obvious external role models to encourage financial understanding and short term horizons.
Alan Pickering, Chairman of Life Academy said: “The use of our financial life plan template will help people get their life and financial planning ducks in a row, whether these plans cover weeks, months or years.Taking a broader view, financial life planning will not only improve individual outcomes, but have an exponential impact on the nation’s financial health and sense of social cohesion.”
- Life Academy believes that a financial life plan should support a savings strategy that:
- Starts in childhood (supported by family and friends)
- Is underpinned by financial literacy taught at school
- Encourages positive debt management
- Assumes the necessary protection is taken for life events
- Provides other ‘savings’ for emergency
- Assumes a workplace pension is taken when offered, but is not viewed as the only solution
- Assumes private pension if not workplace scheme is possible
- Does not rely on property price inflation
- Assumes access to some guaranteed state provision
- Assumes a working life into later age.
