Five things you can do now to protect your family for the future

Living in the now can be an exhilarating way of having a great time in life. But sometimes it pays financially, spiritually and emotionally to plan for the future, and turn those grim rainy debt-laden days into holidays and high-times.

Get Private insurance

Insuring yourself in the event of illness, injury, redundancy or other tests that life may throw at you will provide comfort in times of trouble. It’s worth getting a bespoke, client-based package from this great insurer or others to prevent paying over the odds for irrelevant cover.

Cover might also provide short-term insurance for holidays or excursions, which might be especially useful if your holidays are strenuous. You can also insure your partner and even your pets should you wish.

Set up an ISA/savings account

You may have an ISA (Individual Savings Account) yourself as a way of securing funds at a good interest rate, but what about setting one up for your children? A junior ISA will allow you to put aside a maximum of £4,080 a year for your youngsters with tax-free interest, meaning that you’ll potentially have put aside £73,000 plus interest by the time they hit adulthood. That would pay for a car, house deposit and/or university tuition fees.

One thing to remember is that at 18 years of age the ISA is transferred to an adult cash ISA in the child’s name, meaning that they can spend it as they please.

Invest

Did your parents tell you, when you spoke about the house in which you were growing up, that it would one day be yours? Probably so, and it’s based on the fact that bricks and mortar are among the most stable investment channels.

The best tip for inexperienced investors is to diversify your portfolio. Ideas include:

  • paying off your own mortgage as quickly as possible and buying another property to rent out, to take advantage of rising house prices.
  • Investing in a fund, where your money is put into multiple shares with other investors and managed by a fund manager who does the hard work of market analysis for you.
  • a cash savings account, which will probably give a lower interest rate but could be more secure than shares.

Take up property/contents insurance

If you do invest in property, valuables, cars, boats or other items of expense, then you’ll need some form of security in the event of disaster or theft. While it might seem an annoyance to be paying out several sets of insurance per month, consider that pay out to be negated by a potential rise in house prices. Make sure you notify your insurer if the property is to be rented out, since the terms may be different.

Research a pension

If you have access to a workplace insurance scheme then joining up should be one of the easiest decisions you ever have to make, since your employer will most likely contribute to the scheme themselves, to be then topped up by the government in the form of tax relief.

A workplace pension cuts out the hassle of searching for the correct private pension yourself, since your employer will have done the research and will hopefully have found the best scheme for its workers. In any case, by 2018 all employees will automatically be enrolled into a scheme unless they choose to opt out.

Comments are closed.