If you are serious about building wealth, then you're going to need to put your money to work for you. This is where investing comes in. Before you start investing, you first need to make a plan. A financial plan will allow you to save money, afford the things you really want, and achieve long-term goals like saving for a house and retirement. After that, it is a relatively simple process of assessing your spending, savings, investments and making adjustments that put you on track to achieve those goals.
Step 1: Write down your financial goals
Get clear on your goals - what are your short-term needs? What do you want to accomplish in the next 5 to 10 years? What are you saving for the long term? It's easy to talk about goals in general, but get really specific and write them down. Some examples of goals are taking a year to travel, retiring early, buying a house, saving for a wedding or starting your own business.
Be sure to include saving for retirement, this should be a career goal. The idea of becoming a millionaire may sound daunting, but for most 20 somethings, they will need to have 1 million or more to retire comfortably. See the following retirement calculators which provide a good starting point in how much you would need to continue a certain standard of living.
Work out what money you’ll need, by when and develop a map to get you there by ranking which goals are most important to you.
Step 2: Net Worth - Work out your starting point
Achieving your goals requires understanding where you stand today. So start with what you have. Write down a list of all your assets - bank and investment accounts, properties and any other valuable personal property. Next, make a list of all your debts - mortgage, credit cards, student loans. Once you have a list of both assets and debts, subtract the debts from the assets to come up with your net worth. Working in the yachting industry it would be most common to be in the positive. If you are in the negative, step 4 looks at how to tackle it.
Step 3: Keeping track of your finances – create a budget
Once you have your net worth, it’s time to look at your cash flow, which is how much you spend versus how much you earn. Most people will discover they’re spending more than they thought and will need to make some changes. In other words: you need a budget. A budget is simply a spending plan that takes into account both current and future income and expenses. Having a budget keeps your spending in check and makes sure your savings are on track for the future. You can make it as straightforward or as complicated as you like. It is just about what works for you. People can do it with a notebook, an app or if you prefer a computer and a spreadsheet. See related article on how to create a budget that will take no more than 10 mins to maintain a month. When you notice that a few simple changes will free up money to do the things that you genuinely value, you’ll find it easy to stick to the program and make even more changes.
Step 4: Get rid of any pesky bad debt
The first step on the journey to financial freedom is to clear off any outstanding bad debt. Debt has typically negative connotations associated with it, but not all debt is bad. The easiest way to differentiate between the two is that good debt provides a financial benefit over and above the money, thereby leaving you better off overall. For example, a mortgage is good debt as once this has been repaid, you are left with the ownership of the property which can increase in capital value and also may potentially provide income through renting this out. Whereas, bad debt doesn’t give any future financial benefit, i.e. credit cards (even if it does offer a reward program, research shows that in the long run, there is no benefit to the customer.
If you do have bad debt, the best way to get rid of it is to focus on clearing one debt at a time and prioritising the debt that incurs the highest interest first.
Step 4. Pay your future-self first and build an emergency fund
You may be familiar with Warren Buffet who is one of the most well-known investors, and he suggests that as soon as you receive your salary to put a set amount directly into different investment accounts. It complements the budgeting step above as having a clear image on your expenditure is the first step to calculating the portion of your salary you require for expenses and avoids having money setting in your account just waiting to be spent.
Emergency Fund - Predicting what may happen over the next 12 months is near impossible so in order to protect your wealth for whatever life might throw at you is to start with an emergency fund. An emergency fund is money that you have set aside to cover any unexpected financial instances – quitting your job, losing your phone or any other major expense which causes you stress when they come along. A good rule of thumb is to have three months of salary set aside in a savings account with instant access. You will want to ensure that you are earning a little bit of interest, 1-3%, to beat inflation so shop around to ensure that you are getting the most competitive rate on the market.
Step 5: Determine your risk level
Next, decide the levels of risk you’re willing to take, perhaps based on how soon you might need to reaccess your money. In general, the more long-term the investment, the more risk you should be able to tolerate. Because, while things can very much go down as well as up – you’ll have more time to recover from any short-term losses.
Take the risk test -- > What type of investor are you?
Step 6: Build your financial plan
Now it’s time to build your financial plan. There are all kinds of ways you can do this, but when you have short term and long term financial goals it is a good idea to create separate accounts, so the financial goal is clear and you are not tempted to dip into set aside funds unnecessarily i.e. travel vs house financial goals.
You can be very specific and set a certain amount or percentage to spend on each category. I streamlined my bank accounts so that I had four in total. If you set up automatic payments to transfer money to your investing accounts soon after you get paid, then you won’t notice it in your bank account in the first place.
Bank accounts
- Daily account (X% of your income) - where my income goes and what is used for day to day spending. I have automatic transfers set up that transfers.
- Other expenses (X% of your income) - these are usually fixed expenses that are easy to determine and cover essential expenses for everyday life mortgage, bills, car insurance etc.
- Emergency fund (in total three months of salary) - instant access savings account earning 1-3% interest. See step 4.
- Save to spend (X% of your income) - for me, this is a travel saving account and I would put this in a similar account to an emergency fund.
- Long term investment account (X% of your income) - The focus is on long term growth to maximise wealth generation (on average, 7% return is a good return over a time horizon of 10 years). I have discussed in previous articles why passive investing is favoured for long term investing and a popular passive investment is exchange-traded funds. You can see more information in the related articles linked.
Another great investment tool that is becoming popular is Robo-advisors. A Robo-advisor is a digital software platform that creates investment portfolios based on a computer algorithm. When you sign up, you will get asked a number of questions such as your age, risk tolerance, current retirement savings, and desired age of retirement. It will then determine what you should be investing in (i.e. % in shares and % in fixed income) and exactly how much you should save every month. This is delivering the service of a financial planner at a fraction of the price.
As a reminder, the key to saving is preserving the value of your money and ensuring that the interest rates are higher than inflation in order to limit your losses. Inflation is the rate at which the prices of goods and services are rising. Inflation means a dollar, pound or euro buys less with each year. Money earning no interest will lose value over time. For example, annual inflation of 3% would halve the value of your cash in just 24 years. Read more here.
Once you have your financial plan outlined it is used as a tool to track your progress and it is important to review your plan at least annually or after major life milestones to make the necessary adjustments in your goals or risk tolerance.
Information provided by goBuoyant is general in nature and does not take into consideration your personal financial situation. It is for educational purposes only and does not constitute formal financial advice. Remember, the value of any investment can go down as well as up.
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