Female Financial Planning
The pillars of good financial planning remain consistent from situation to situation, however the foundation that sits beneath these pillars can be very different.
This leads to an important starting position when you are thinking about your finances, your needs, and your goals, what it is that you want, and what type of money person are you?
Women commonly have very different approaches, as well as needs when it comes to finances.
Reflecting this aspect, we have created a specialised Female Financial Planning approach run by Kealy Ball, to help women who are looking for help, support, advice and solutions.
Why Our Approach to Money is Crucial
Money is a medium towards lifestyle.
Money, on its own, has no value, except what it can be exchanged for.
So, in financial planning we have to get the link right between what we do to organise our finances in the moment, balanced against our future needs, both balanced against our wishes and desires.
We need money to pay for the essentials, current and future, but we also want to enjoy our life and money pays for certain luxuries and desirable activities.
This balancing act will change from person to person. For females planning their finances, the priorities may be different and this can lead to a different way of balancing the planning decisions.
The nature of our own mindset and positions leads to behavioural finance, and this is important to understand when we are deciding how we want to navigate the financial world.
Behavioural Finance
This is a form of social science, reflecting the importance of us, as people, in the process. This wraps in our personality traits, beliefs, and the way we see the world.
An example would be how we view risk. Different people have different attitudes to risk, and this can lead to different investment decisions, obviously a risk taker will favour higher risk investments, and a risk adverse person, the opposite.
Part of good financial planning is to work with this behavioural aspect, because your money management and decisions need to reflect your wishes, and these include your feelings of security and need for comfort and so on. Different people react to things differently, and view the world differently.
All of this influences how you make decisions and how you react, for example, if something doesn’t work out as expected.
What Kealy can do in these situations, is reflect this in how she helps you to navigate forward.
It’s not just case of going along with your particular characteristics, because there may be occasions when you need to do something different to your natural inclination, but to balance the behavioural aspects with the financial wisdom of tackling a requirement in a certain way.
This is why the financial planning in these cases can be considered a form of partnership and have coaching elements to it.
The pillars of good financial management
Good financial management and planning will be consistent, in terms of the basic foundations you need to put in place. However, around this there will be many elements where individual circumstances change the decisions you need to make.
A great example of this is that everyone desires comfort and security in retirement. So, saving for retirement and planning ahead, probably decades in advance, is a pillar.
However, many females have underfunded pension situations, sometimes due to family commitments earlier in their working lives, and this means that there can be challenges to meet the requirement as set out. How this is tackled is very much individual case dependent, but this can lead to different decisions than for someone who has worked all their life and has built up a reasonable entitlement.
The solutions may need to look very different as a result.
In general terms, it is always best to get ahead of the game, and this means constructing a financial plan as early as possible.
In other cases females may need to deal with particular life events and we cover some of these below.