In the final week of our Financial Detox, we will be looking at the more holistic view of your financial situation.
When you’re looking at your finances in general, it’s not just about what the outgoings are, not just about what the goals and long term medium goals are, it is also looking at what are your finances like? How does that fit? How are you budgeting? What’s your income? And then looking at what your holistic financial position is.Â
It’s always good to take a step back, whether it’s once a quarter or twice a year, and evaluate the bigger picture. It is important to have a list of all your general outgoings, the provider and the review date. This is a more systematic way for you to review your finances especially when you can set dates in your calendar.Â
Sometimes, we can’t deal with all of those things all at once so we need to set a priority. We’ll focus on the first core thing that you’re wanting to sort out best and work on that. We can sometimes do two or three things at once, maybe not more than two. And then once you tick those boxes, we can move on to the next. Putting it all together, and looking at the overall picture is crucial so you can see all the little pieces and set a priority to the different things that need to be done first.Â
In the hierarchy of needs, protection is actually higher up the priorities, then retirement or savings. And even in some instances, mortgages. Protection is before savings and investing because basically, if you or your partner was to die, one of you would be out on the street if you can’t pay your mortgage. The government is not going to bail you out so you need to make sure you have protection in place when worse comes to worst.Â
A lot of people struggle the most with how to put the pieces together? They’ve got all these elements so how do they bring it together into a plan? That’s why I created a quiz called financial wellbeing assessment. It gets you to think about your current financial well-being so a holistic financial advisor will be able to help you come up with the best plan.Â
Take the quiz here: https://evolutionfinancialplanning.co.uk/financial-well-being-quiz/
One thing you can do too is to create a Google Drive account. Upload in there your budget planners, including the other documents like your life insurance document, a copy of your will, any life said life insurance, your most recent mortgage offer, and everything you need. And then you can create a summary. This means that if anything was to happen to you or your partner, one of you can pick your important documents up in one place.
Ultimately, this financial detox is for us to get to the end of the month having the money leftover for our future plans or get to the end of the month where we learn to put more purpose on our money and learn more about the right spending habits. For example,Â
- when you have total control of where your next month’s salary should be going.Â
- you know how much you need to be putting aside andÂ
- setting what intentions you have with your money from this day forward
So if you’ve learned a few things over the past four weeks you may have realized that you’ve got a certain spending habit that you should stop doing or you should change for the better. Maybe you want to set a tighter budget on certain things, so that you can send that money to a different account or take it out in cash and have it just in an envelope and use it for your future plans. If you start to think about what bigger plans you need to put into play, then you probably can say your financial detox is a success.
But if you don’t really feel like you’ve achieved any of that, go back to week one.
Listen to the full podcast here: https://rebeccarobertson.co.uk/podcast/
If you missed week 1,2 and 3, you can watch the replay inside Money Mastery Collective.Â
Or you can head over to my YouTube Channel and watch the replays there.Â
Week 1 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_E1kaVvdg-M
Week 2 – https://youtu.be/BzOSyC10x8E
Week 3 – https://youtu.be/IDCrKiyPSIs
