Women in Financial Services

Female financial planning

The pillars of good financial planning stay consistent from one situation to the next — but the foundation beneath them can be very different. That leads to an important starting point: when you think about your finances, your needs and your goals, what is it you actually want, and what kind of money person are you?

Women commonly have very different approaches, as well as different needs, when it comes to finances. Reflecting that, we’ve created a specialised Female Financial Planning approach, run by Kealy Ball, to help women looking for advice, support and solutions.

Why our approach to money is crucial

So in financial planning we have to get the link right: what we do to organise our finances in the moment, balanced against our future needs, and both balanced against our wishes and desires. We need money for the essentials, now and later — but we also want to enjoy life, and money pays for certain luxuries and the things we love doing.

This balancing act changes from person to person. For women planning their finances, the priorities may be different, and that can lead to a different way of weighing up the decisions. The nature of our own mindset and circumstances leads us to behavioural finance — which is important to understand when deciding how to navigate the financial world.

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Behavioural finance

This is a form of social science — it reflects the importance of us, as people, in the process, wrapping in our personality traits, beliefs, and the way we see the world.

Take how we view risk. Different people have different attitudes to it, which lead to different investment decisions: a risk-taker will favour higher-risk investments, and a risk-averse person the opposite. Part of good financial planning is working with this behavioural side, because your money decisions need to reflect your wishes — including your feelings of security and your need for comfort.

What Kealy does is reflect this in how she helps you move forward. It’s not simply a case of going along with your natural inclinations — there may be times you need to do something different to your instinct, balancing the behavioural side with the financial wisdom of tackling things a certain way. That’s why planning like this can be considered a partnership, with coaching elements to it.

The pillars of good financial management

The basic foundations you need to put in place stay consistent — but around them, individual circumstances change the decisions you make. Everyone wants comfort and security in retirement, so saving and planning ahead, often decades in advance, is a pillar.

Yet many women have underfunded pensions — sometimes due to family commitments earlier in their working lives — which can make that pillar harder to meet. How it’s tackled is very much individual, and the solutions may need to look quite different from someone who has worked continuously and built up a reasonable entitlement. In general it’s always best to get ahead of the game, which means building a financial plan as early as possible.

In other cases, women may need to deal with particular life events — and we cover some of those separately.