1. Understand your financial situation
Understanding your financial situation is an important first step towards achieving a stable and successful financial future. By taking the time to assess your current financial position, you can gain valuable insights into your income, expenses, assets, and debts.
This knowledge can empower you to make informed decisions when it comes to budgeting, saving, investing, and planning for the future. By understanding your financial situation, you can get a clear picture of where you stand financially and identify areas for improvement.
Our Financial Health Check can help you figure out how you are currently doing with your finances. You'll go through a set of questions about your savings, life insurance and pension needs and the Financial Health Check will highlight the areas where you are doing well and where things could be improved.
2. Understand your long-term goals
Defining your financial goals is an essential step in creating an effective financial plan. These goals serve as a roadmap to guide you towards your desired financial future.
Your financial goals could be short-term such us saving for a holiday, medium-term such as saving for a wedding or a mortgage, or long-term such us saving for retirement or your children's education.
Our blog articles explain how you can set your financial goals as well as how you can start budgeting and saving to achieve them.
3. Create a financial plan
Once you’ve used our Financial Health Check, you’ll get a good understanding of your financial situation. To take it to the next stage, you should get in touch with a financial advisor as they will help you identify the best way to put a financial plan in place.
Together you can develop a financial roadmap aligned with your lifestyle and needs. You can arrange a free consultation with Zurich or find an external advisor in your area using our financial advisor finder.
4. Find the products and solutions you need
Either by using the Financial Health Check or by getting in touch with a financial planner, the next step is to identify the products you need in order to achieve your goals.
Pension: After examining your current situation and understanding your goals, the Financial Health Check will help evaluate your pension needs and suggest the next steps to take. A pension plan could help you achieve your desired retirement income for your life after retirement. It is also a very efficient tax planning tool as there is good tax relief on pension contributions available.
- Calculate now what you may need to put away for your retirement by using our Pension Calculator.
Savings and investments: By looking at your current situation, the Financial Health Check will estimate your future financial needs. The tool will show you how your savings could potentially grow in a Zurich investment fund over time – whether you have a lump sum available to invest or you want to save regularly, or both. You have the flexibility to choose and change investment strategies to best align to your needs as your circumstances change over time.
Life insurance: Once you’ve looked at your family and personal finances, the Financial Health Check will help identify your life insurance needs. There are different types of life insurance, but essentially it is used to protect you and your family in case of unforeseen events. At Zurich we provide mortgage protection, income protection, life insurance, serious illness and cancer cover tailored to individual needs.
Navigating the different options available can be difficult especially for beginners. You can use our life cover calculator to help you find out your life cover needs, and after using the Financial Heath Check, it’s a good idea to engage with a financial advisor who can guide your through the different options. The Zurich financial planning team can offer you a free financial consultation or use our advisor finder tool to locate an advisor in your area.
5. Implement your new strategy
Implementing a new financial plan into your routine is not always straightforward. The good news is that if you have decided to take this step you probably are motivated enough to stick to your new plan.
Whether you are building up funds towards your retirement, have embarked on a new savings plan or want life insurance for peace of mind, developing good financial habits is key as you will more than likely have to cut back on other expenditures in order to allocate funds for your new savings or protection needs.
We have created a handy budgeting calculator that could help you identify your current spending habits. This should also give you a better understanding of where the budget for your new objectives can come from.
6. Review your financial plan regularly
Reviewing your financial strategy regularly is essential to make sure you are on track to achieve your objectives. It is also important to evaluate whether your personal circumstances have changed. You can use the Financial Health Check on a regular basis to take a snapshot of your current situation and evaluate whether it has changed, and if it has, your plan can be amended to suit your new circumstances.
