Thinking about choosing boxes for your money?

A 10 to 20-minute read – depending on your speed

This is the first of four Insights on how to choose the right boxes for your money.

In this series, we’ll equip you with an eight-point checklist for assessing any financial product (or strategy) that anyone could ever put to you.

And this checklist will help you make sound money decisions – whatever your age, income, wealth and investing experience.

Could this checklist save your financial life?

It’s possible that this checklist could save your financial life or that of friends and family members you share it with – in two ways:

First, following this checklist will help you avoid those hideous investment scams which wipe out the savings of thousands of people every year.

Second, this checklist will help you find suitable and efficient boxes for your money, which means you could either:

1. Achieve more of your financial life goals – the goals that cost money.
2. Reduce the amount you must save or invest for those goals.
3. Achieve your life goals sooner.

Universal and Evergreen

The checklist we’ll outline in this series is also ‘Universal’ and ‘Evergreen’, which means it’ll help you make sound decisions regardless of:

• Your age, income, wealth and investing experience.
• What’s happening in the world – to the economy, stock markets, interest rates or taxes?
• Where you live in the world*

So, the checklist will help you assess any financial product or strategy that anyone could ever offer you.

* Please note: The examples of financial products and taxes we use to illustrate this checklist only apply to UK nationals who are UK residents. 

So, while the checklist will help you wherever (and whoever) you are, you must apply these checks to the products and tax reliefs available in your part of the world.

Do you currently have a financial adviser?

If you don’t yet work with a good financial adviser or coach, we’d encourage you to consider doing so. And our Insight, ‘Should you pay for advice – and at what price?’  will help you to think through that question.

All our Insights are designed to complement and reinforce any good advice you receive. So, we won’t cut across any professional adviser relationship you have.

Indeed, this checklist will help you understand the thinking that goes into sound financial advice. And equip you to ask the right questions if you’re unsure of any product-related features.

Learning this checklist will help you engage more confidently in money conversations—with professionals, family, and friends.

It might even make those (sometimes dull?) chats about financial matters more interesting!

What’s coming up in these four Insights?

In the next Insight, we’ll outline our checklist and explain how and when you could use it to make sound financial decisions.

Then in Insights three and four, we’ll dig deeper into each of those checks with examples of how they could help you to choose the right boxes (or strategies) for your money.

First, in this insight, we’ll explore why you need to use a good checklist and where this ‘money box selection’ task fits in the broader financial planning process.

Very few people are aware of what good financial planning looks like, and most are surprised to learn that ‘money box selection’ is the wrong place to start designing your financial life plan.

So, let’s deal with that question now.

Are you starting in the right place?

Have you heard the joke about the tourist in Dublin who asks ‘Patrick’ for directions to the train station?

‘Ahh, the train station, you say?’ says Patrick,

‘Well, if I were you, I’d not start from here!’

Patrick’s answer is funny because it’s absurd – yet it perfectly describes the most common mistake people make when planning their money.

Too often, we start from the wrong place.

So, let’s be clear: your financial planning journey does not start by choosing financial products.

Any good adviser will tell you this:

Financial products are the last thing you need, to design your financial life plan.

Yes, you might need some financial products as a result of the planning process.

You might also need to change some of the products you already own—if they’re poor value for money or lack the features you need, for example.

However, the question of which money boxes to use is not the first thing to consider.

For financial advisers, planners and coaches

This educational Insight is one of many we’ve created for you to use under license in your business to help more people make better financial decisions – and see the value of professional advice.

You can brand these licensable insights to your business style and add your own firm’s calls to action.

If you have any questions, please email me at hello@paulclaireaux.com