Partnering with a qualified and experienced financial planner can add enormous value by helping you identify and achieve your financial goals, establish a financial plan, invest your savings appropriately and protect your capital against unnecessary risks. Where you may believe that you are saving costs by cutting out “the middleman” and managing your savings on your own, you may be losing more due to an inappropriate investment strategy and an inefficient tax structure.
In this newsletter, we will explore key benefits of partnering with a financial planner and the pitfalls of managing your own money.
The Benefits of Partnering with a Financial Planner
Partnering with a qualified and experienced financial planner can offer you many advantages:
Visibility: A financial planner can provide visibility on how long your savings will last and how to achieve your goals by implementing the best strategies to suit you.
Ensuring that you have the appropriate investment strategy: A financial planner will determine your personal risk profile and match it to the best investment strategy and areas within which to invest.
Structuring your investments tax efficiently: A financial planner can recommend how to invest your money to pay less tax, executor fees and death taxes by placing the right assets in the appropriate local and offshore investment vehicles at the right time.
Guiding you through volatile markets: A financial planner can help protect your investments from major fluctuations in financial markets by lowering risk when markets are expensive and reintroducing measured risk when markets are undervalued.
Helping with changing circumstances: A financial planner can help you adapt your financial plan to the changes that occur in your life, such as marriage, divorce, birth, death, career change, or emigration.
Taking care of your financial affairs: A financial planner can introduce you to other specialists who assist with other aspects of managing your finances, including life assurance, family trust administration, filing tax returns and keeping your Will up to date.
The Pitfalls of Managing Your Own Money
Managing your own money can expose you to many risks and challenges, such as:
Emotional investment decisions: Short-term fluctuations in your investments may cause you to panic and abandon a valuable long-term investment strategy.
Difficulty in cutting through the noise: The abundance of news and information about markets, politics, legislation, and the economy can be overwhelming, and it can become hard to separate the useful information from the harmful.
Ease of falling for investment fads: You may be tempted by new and popular investments that promise high returns, but they may be passing fads that see you lose money when their value falls.
Leaving your beneficiaries in the dark: A financial planner can act as a liaison between your loved ones and your estate, ensuring that your legacy is fulfilled according to your wishes.
Spending more due to an inefficient investment: Although you may be saving on some fees, you may end up paying more due to higher taxes or losses caused by investing in a poorly selected investment strategy or fund. Good financial planning pays for itself.
How we can help you
Investment advice: We will analyse your investments to understand their make-up and help identify problem areas and provide improvements.
Financial planning: Our financial planning process can help you determine how best to structure your investments so that you can achieve your personal goals before and after retirement. Read more about our financial planning process on our Advanced Financial Planning page.
Contact us at info@investonline.co.za or call 021 001 2323 to arrange an introductory meeting with one of our Client Portfolio Managers.