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…

Tax is a necessary evil. If we want to live in a country with access to public services, taxation is the system used to pay for these services. We can (and do!) argue and moan about the different levels of tax payable and whether they are levied fairly. But at the end of the day, the money to be used for public services has to be collected somewhere.

While most people accept that tax must be collected, most people certainly do not want to pay more than their fair share. So as we approach the 31^st October tax payment deadline for individuals (or 10th November if you file through Revenue Online System), we’ve set out 5 ways that can help you to reduce your tax burden either now or in the future. All of these are perfectly legitimate and are not considered aggressive tax practices – they are simply good tax housekeeping that is sometimes ignored.

In financial planning businesses such as our own, a relatively small proportion of our time is spent dealing with the implementation and servicing of financial products on behalf of our clients. Because financial planning is so much deeper than simply putting products in place. 

Instead our clients today come to us with relatively simple questions (that are in fact quite complex) such as "Will we always be ok?" or "Have we enough money?" There's no easy answers to these ones! Because to answer them, we need to know what sort of a life you want to lead, and then we need to put a cost on that life. It's only then that we can start to develop a financial plan to help you achieve that life, help you build a risk appropriate investment portfolio, plan for your retirement and protect yourself if that's what your plan requires. 

But sometimes our clients approach us about other financial challenges they might have, or indeed simply want to bounce ideas off us! We’re delighted to help and give you an opinion if we can. And if we can’t help you directly ourselves, we often know someone who can actually help you.

Here are some of the areas we've been asked about.

According to the Census carried out in 2011, 12% of families in Ireland are now made up of cohabiting couples.  This cohort of our population still faces some unique challenges when it comes to personal finance and inheritance. In this article, we’re going to identify some of the significant issues to be managed, and set out why it is so important for cohabiting couples to get expert financial advice. Not doing so could result in some very expensive tax liabilities down the road!

Small & Medium Enterprises (SME’s) and pensions schemes… they don’t appear too often in the same sentence! Pensions are a real issue for employees working in these small businesses and a headache for their employers. So what is the current situation and what needs to be done?

History teaches us many things. Particularly if we’re looking for a bit of guidance in prudent personal financial management, the last decade offers us a wealth of useful lessons.

A marriage breakup is usually a traumatic time. Very significant life decisions are needed about custody of children and access arrangements, and where each party will live. Often relations between the parties become quite fraught… and then financial arrangements need to be agreed.

At this stage, the difficult areas of dividing up the assets, maintenance payments and agreeing the ongoing repayment of debt need to be tackled. Having a financial planner involved in this process is very valuable, as they will approach the task in hand without emotion. Our job is simply to achieve the very best outcome in relation to the financial issues that will inevitably arise.

So to help you, here are some of the areas that we can help you with.