A friend of mine jokes that “money isn’t everything but it’s up there with oxygen!!” For years, many of us have probably believed the gist of this statemant but, over the last few years, more and more people have started to look at money in a different way. 

Traditional financial advice focuses on your money which, in the past, was considered a reasonable way to do things. It’s what we’ve grown up with and what we’ve come to expect. It’s what I was taught to focus on when I started my career in finance. So it’s hardly surprising that when people look for financial advice they think it’s right that the money they have should be the sole focus of the advice.

However, like most things in life, financial advice moves on and improves and it turns out that it really isn’t all about the money at all. We now see that really effective advice should be all about you, about figuring out what you want to achieve in life, what you’d ideally like to spend the limited time you have on this earth doing and how you can use the money you have to do those things. In short, you should approach Financial Planning and decision making in the following order:

Define your Goals -the most important part of any plan.

Design your Lifestyle Financial Plan to help you achieve your goals.

Choose the Investment that will most effectively serve your Financial Plan. . 

Forget traditional advice, don’t start with your money, start by putting what’s most important to you at the centre of your financial decisions, you’ll be amazed at how beneficial this can be.