Traditionally the role of a financial adviser has been to help you grow your financial resources. This has evolved significantly in more recent times into a much broader role, as financial planners have developed the skills and the tools to provide a lot more value than this. Sitting at the heart of what we do now is helping you to identify the life that you want to live, and then through careful financial planning, guiding you on your financial journey to ensure you achieve your goals and dreams.

As part of our financial planning conversations with you, we always bring the attention around to subjects that are not easy to think about – a serious illness or death visiting a family member or indeed yourself. We all naturally don’t want to spend too long thinking about this, but unfortunately for us to do our job properly it’s a subject that we simply must contemplate.

We’d like to share a story with you that originated back in 1963 when published by the German writer, Heinrich Böll. It’s a very short story, but perfectly captures one of the key messages that we stress with our clients.

Well there is no exhaustive list for this one – there really are so many potential factors that can influence your investment returns. When you ask a professional investor, they will often jump to factors such as the economy, sentiment and interest rates. All very relevant factors.

2018 ended with a bit of a sting in the tail for investors, where we saw a lot of volatility in markets and a modest correction. While many analysts are forecasting single digit growth in 2019, they are also suggesting that 2019 may be another bumpy ride for investors with more volatility in markets. We fully recognise that volatility can cause uncertainty and lack of confidence for investors, but it's our job to help you to avoid making mistakes now that will hurt your long term financial future. 

Here are a few habits and behaviours that we believe will stand you in good stead throughout 2019, and will prevent you from making short term mistakes that will negatively impact you in the future.  

At the start of a new year and as outlined in our other article this month, we all tend to take stock of how we manage our finances. We look at our financial habits, ways of saving money and managing our spending better. This is also a great time of year to take a hard look at our retirement planning, to ensure it is in the best shape possible.

Here goes on five reasons why we think it’s a good time now to do so.

We hope that you have experienced the quiet evolution of our role in recent years. Going back in time, the role of the financial adviser was to help clients to identify gaps that they had in their portfolio of financial products, to find the best products to fill those gaps and to then put these products in place for clients. While this is still an important strand of what we do, our role has evolved in recent years into a much broader and more valuable service.

Paying tax bills can be a challenging time for both business owners and sole traders alike. Of course if your business is very successful, tax is simply an expense that needs to be met when your tax payment deadline rolls around. However, there are also many small enterprises that don’t enjoy the comfort of high levels of excess cashflow. For these businesses, the tax payment deadline can be a stressful time, gathering all expenses together and working with your accountant to identify ways in which you can legitimately reduce your tax liability.

Pension contributions are rightly viewed as one of the most effective ways of reducing your tax liability. The challenge is often having the spare cashflow to make that pension contribution while also being able to meet your tax payment! And as a result, the pension contribution often gets reduced or indeed removed in order to meet the tax liability. The unintended consequence of this is that your retirement plans and future lifestyle are now at risk.

So what’s the alternative?

The approach that many sole traders and business owners take to overcome this problem is to make pension contributions regularly (usually monthly) throughout the year, rather than leaving the pension contribution until the last minute. This approach has a number of advantages.

You’re putting yourself at the top of the queue

Leaving your pension contribution until the end of the year results in this payment being based effectively on money available, rather than your retirement plans. The outcome is often a reduced pension contribution and when this happens, the loser is your future self. Your retirement plan is being paid after everybody else, putting you right at the back of your cashflow queue.

The alternative is to work with us on identifying a sustainable regular amount. By then making this contribution regularly each month, you have accelerated yourself to the top of the queue, putting your future self before other expenses. After a while, this simply becomes another regular expense of the business (like your rent, salaries, power and other monthly payments) but now you are truly working for yourself and not just to pay other people’s bills.

When you think of retirement, what do you think about? Is it those additional games of golf, spending a few months every year in the sun and lots of time with the grandkids? Or instead do you think about your pension fund and silently worry that you might not have enough money to do all the things that you want to do?

Income Protection is sometimes described as the glue in a financial portfolio. The most devastating impact on your financial situation is likely to be caused by a loss of your income, and the inability to replace it.

In this final instalment of our age-related articles, it is now the turn of the more senior members of our communities – all of you in your 70’s and older. This group have some very specific financial challenges, so here are some thoughts on wisely managing your financial affairs.

There finally seems to be some level of commitment at a government level to dealing with Ireland’s looming pension crisis. This is as a result of an ever-widening gap between what people are saving for retirement, and how much they will actually need to enjoy a comfortable retirement.

We are in the business of helping you to achieve the life that you want to lead, through wise management of your money and by helping you to establish sound financial behaviours. We know from experience that developing a financial plan for you is the first step to enabling you to achieve your desired lifestyle, followed by years and years of relentless and rigorous focus on this plan. It will never be achieved by short term tactical genius and taking bets.

In relation to your financial behaviours, our role is akin to being your (financial) guardian angel! The biggest factor in wealth destruction is very often the investor’s own misguided behaviours and actions. As a result the most important role that we can play is to stop you making mistakes that will impact your wealth. This is sometimes the unseen work that we do, so we thought it would be useful to give you a sense of a few ways in which we add value, without you probably even realising it!

This month it’s time for the latest in our series of age related articles – welcome to the world of the sixty-somethings! As you (potentially) approach the end of your working life, you are at a really important stage in your financial life. We hope to give you some food for thought to ensure you make the wisest financial decisions to see you through the next phase of your life.

This is the latest in our series of articles that consider the financial challenges for clients at a specific stage in life. This time we’re looking at people who are in their 50’s. This is a really important stage in your financial life as it is often the time in life of maximum income and the greatest opportunity to really build your wealth.

Here are some thoughts on how you might approach your finances differently in the second half-century of your life.

We’re now well into 2018 and we often find that the finances of our clients settle down a bit at this time of year. The madness of Christmas is behind us,and a lot of annual financial commitments have often come and gone at the start of the year. Spring is a good time to take a step back and consider how you can maximise the impact of your financial resources in achieving your desired lifestyle.

We’ve done some thinking on this and have set out 8 ways in which careful management of your finances can positively impact your lifestyle goals.

We recently wrote about why people should be thinking about their retirement in their 30’s, and why this is the time when you should start seriously saving to achieve your desired lifestyle in retirement. We got a great reaction to this article, and were asked by a number of people in their 40’s for some tips in relation to managing money at their stage of life.

With markets having powered ahead in recent years, in general people are happier talking about the performance of their investment portfolio. After all, it’s easier to talk about gains than losses! But we’ve noticed some conversations shifting towards consolidation of gains as the prospect of a turn in markets probably moves closer all the time. We’re not in the business of trying to time markets, but help investors to take a long-term perspective with their investments and to build a portfolio that matches your own attitude to risk.

When we’re designing an investment portfolio for our clients, we take into account quite a number of considerations. We start by understanding your investment goals and time horizons, and then we build a full understanding of your liquidity requirements, any asset class preferences that you might have and also the returns that you expect.

Well the short answer is no, you’re not mad to be thinking about retirement in your 30’s. Of course it is not going to be foremost in your mind as there are lots of competing priorities – a house to be bought, maybe a wedding to be celebrated or a family to be started. And these also don’t take into account the holidays, cars and social life that are there to be enjoyed!

So planning for retirement is probably well down the list…