We get check ups on our cars, our houses, our bodies and even our pets. However, what about getting an annual financial check up on our life? We all have dreams and goals. However, certain financial obstacles may put a dent or act as a stop sign against our plans to achieve those goals.
There are many financial changes that can typically occur in any given 12 month period- being laid off of a job, retirement, a natural disaster, a major purchase, an illness, the birth of a child, a marriage, a divorce, a death, cost of college, providing care for an elderly parent and so forth.
What does it mean to get an Annual Financial Check up?
Simply put, it is an annual review of your financial status. Typically, Financial Planners will collect a client’s data (check stubs, checking & credit statements, titles for homes, tax returns, insurance policies, etc.), prioritize their goals, examine resources, make recommendations and implement a plan according to the client’s needs and personal goals.
Whether you are single, married, or have a family, you should want to be in charge of your future. It’s vital to set both short and long-term financial goals. A Financial Planner can help you to achieve these long term goals. Regardless of what your financial situation is, there are Financial Planners who specialize in a variety of areas and cater to your financial needs.
How can you locate a Financial Planner and how do you know if you can trust them?
There are plenty of Financial Planners out there and the relationship you have with a Financial Planner will be very personal. So in addition, also be wary of people who call themselves Financial Planners. A genuine Financial Planner is a Certified Financial Planner (CFP
Aug 01 2010
How About an Annual Financial Check Up?
Jul 16 2010
Financial Advisors – Suze Orman Review
Suze Orman is a financial advising expert and has been on numerous radio and television shows over the past 10 years. She has her own TV show “The Suze Orman Show” (Shown on CNBC), and has also written several best selling books including “Women & Money” and “The Money Book for the Young, Fabulous, and Broke”. Orman appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show just this last year and has also appeared as a guest on numerous other television shows. Suze Orman’s reach to her viewers has been so large over the past decade that People Magazine recently named here one of the worlds most influential individuals. Despite all of this I am not a Suze Orman fan and do not recommend her as a financial advisor.
Many conservatives do not like Suze Orman because she is a lesbian but I see this as insignificant and it has no bearing on my opinion of her. Suze Orman’s personal life has nothing to do with her financial advising skills and should not effect your decision about using her or not. The reason that I do not like Suze Orman is because I do not believe that her plan for achieving financial freedom is as nearly results oriented as many other plans out there.
For most Americans the area of personal finances is a very complex subject that needs to be broken down for us. We need a concrete step by step plan from our advisors that will help us to meet our financial goals. Unfortunately Suze Orman does not give us a step by step plan but rather self-help information about money.
Suze Orman’s advice can be beneficial to some but it just doesn’t include enough concrete steps for how to handle personal finances. Suze’s basic advice is just like all others: cut expenses, pay debts down, save for retirement, etc… The problem with Suze Orman is that most of her other steps are only about changing the way we think about money and using our money to make us happy. Orman has also be criticized for being to basic and generic with here advice. Personal Finances is a very complex subject and people need real answers to solve their real problems rather than having Suze tell them to look for the spare change in their closets and couches.
In Suze’s books she emphasizes the importance of investing in the stock market but then Suze does not even follow her own advice. Suze has less than 5% of her assets in the stock market. There is just something about seeing an advisor not follow their own advice that rubs me and a lot of people the wrong way. Instead of following her own advice Orman investments nearly all of her money like a prehistoric grandmother without any heirs to here money. She puts it in 100% guaranteed very low yielding bonds. This alone is completely against what she suggest to her readers.
Despite all of this Suze Orman does give out fairly sound financial advice. I am simply here to tell you that I would suggest many other advisors over her any day of the week. Suze Orman would be better than not having any financial advisor but she would certainly not be your best bet.
Jul 03 2010
How Do I Create A Budget And Financial Plan?
You can use the Money program to create a budget. By using Money for budgeting purposes, you can compare your actual spending to your budgeted spending. You use Money’s Budget Planner tool to set up a budget.
1. Display the Budget Planner window.
Click the Planner link, and choose Budget Planner. Money then displays the Budget Planner window.
2. Use the Budget Planner Wizard.
The Budget Planner Wizard steps you through a very thorough process for creating a budget based on your exact income, your long-term savings plans and goals, the possibility of occasional extraordinary expenses, your contractual debt payments for car loans and mortgages, and your anticipated expenses. To step through this planning process, click hyperlinks in the Budget Planner window. Read the instructions inside the windows and, when prompted, provide data by filling in fields. After you finish with the Budget Planner Wizard, you have a complete and very detailed budget.
How do I create a personal financial plan?
Money supplies a Lifetime Planner tool that in effect creates a personal financial plan for you. The Lifetime Planner is a wizard that collects and then analyzes a large volume of personal financial data concerning you and your family, your current financial situation, and your future financial aspirations. The Lifetime Planner starts with a video. Just as with the Budget Planner, read the instructions inside the windows and, when prompted, provide data by filling in fields.
Personal financial planning sounds complex, but it consists of three basic tasks: First, you need to make sure that you manage your day-to-day finances in a way that keeps your financial affairs simple and hassle free. (If you use the Money program to keep your checkbook and other financial records, you are already doing this.)
Second, personal financial planning means identifying and then prudently preparing for long-term financial objectives, such as a comfortable retirement, sending a child to college, or making a major purchase, such as a house. You can spend an enormous amount of time planning for these sorts of major events, but you don’t have to because the planning process isn’t all that difficult. In most cases, you can figure out what you need to do to retire quite easily. Numerous books have been written on the subject.
The same is true of other financial objectives-if you take advantage of well known and popularly discussed tools, it is typically not that difficult to prepare.
The third element of personal financial planning is the mitigation of financial risks where possible. This is perhaps the least understood and most overlooked task of personal financial planning. In a nutshell, you need to make sure that a personal tragedy, such as loss of life of a breadwinner or a serious illness, doesn’t become a financial tragedy.
Obviously, you can’t prevent personal tragedies. Parents die, children get terrible illnesses, and catastrophic events, sometimes forces of nature, destroy property and wreak havoc on people’s lives. However, in all of these cases, you can usually buy insurance that lets you share the cost of these financial disasters with large groups of other people. Then if you happen to become the next unfortunate victim, you will at least receive a claim payment that minimizes or eliminates the financial costs.
How do I plan for a child’s college expenses?
The goal is to save enough money in the years before a child goes off to college to pay for four or five years of tuition.
The first step is to make an estimate about what the child’s college expenses will total. Every year, major U.S. news magazines, such as US News and World Report, provide comprehensive lists of college cost information. Obtain one of these magazines and estimate what college will cost when your son or daughter attends.
After you determine the cost, you then calculate the amount you need to save. The tricky part of saving for college is that you often can’t use investment choices that deliver high real rates of return. In fact, it’s common that you will be saving for college using investment choices that don’t deliver a positive after-tax real rate of return. What this means, unfortunately, is that in many cases you can produce a fairly accurate estimate of how much you need to save for college simply by looking at the total cost of college and dividing this amount by the number of months between now and the time your child attends.
NOTE If you are beginning to save money while your child is still an infant, you may feel comfortable investing in the stock market, which will return a positive after- tax real rate of return.
Apr 08 2010
Life insurance during retirement
Some people don’t understand you and give you a slightly weird look when you tell them that they should not go on with their life insurance plan. They say this – “I can’t just drop it. I need to receive some benefits from it”.
From one point of view it does make sense. But frankly speaking this is the only type of insurance we can offer this with. We cannot afford to do something like this with any other type of insurance plan.
People are very strange with what they believe in. They feel upset when the term expires and they realize that they have not been eligible to any benefits they could have had with the service company. Would you rather suffer than be safe? What a weird point.
In reality you should be happy you lived happily without any worries for ten years. Lifetime insurance is a different insurance to what you may think. Of course, it is meant to give you guarantees throughout your life but who can ever grant you a guarantee that nothing will ever happen to you? This no one knows.
Life insurance is there to keep you safe from financial losses that one can meet with the death of a member of his family. If you are not sure about this type of insurance here are some points for you to consider knowing if this type of insurance is right for you.
If you are mostly worried about your family members or people that you are close to, if you think they can experience hardships in case something tragic happens to you, then this is the perfect insurance for you.
Let’s say you are a retired couple. One of the spouses is seriously ill. There is no longer an income that could support the couple like there was back in the working days. So the seriously ill one has to think about the difficulties his partner might meet if he dies. If there is no such case, you don’t need any life term insurance.
There is another important moment. You have to figure out the right amount of money you want your insurance to be about. Think of how much your family will need to live normally after your death. This is exactly the amount of insurance you need to get. You can pay for your life insurance little by little every month. This is one of the good sides of it.
There are a few insurance types you might want to consider. There is a possibility to get a term insurance or a temporary policy. What is that? Well, it is for the situations in which the financial loss is limited to the gap years between the actual period of time and the retirement. In cases when you have the owner of some sort of business your belongings and so called estate might be the subject to state taxes.
If you are just seeking for a cheap life insurance there is plenty of possibilities to search. You can get a cheap life insurance from internet sites as well as through a trust-worthy company or a well-known appreciated agent. Whatever you do, remember one thing – you need to think about tomorrow today! Especially when you are not alone…
Dec 12 2009
5 Steps To Market Financial Security Toward Retirement Years
Evaluating your financial resources will determine how prepared you are for the future.
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