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If you have talked about retirement planning to a financial advisor in our Perth office, you probably know how diligent and thorough we are in helping our clients leave nothing to chance when planning their futures. While we never give specific financial advice in blog posts due to the individual and unique nature of every financial situation, we would like to present some general actions that are worth consideration for anyone approaching retirement.

Pay Down as Much Debt as Possible

Ideally, you could start your retirement with a “clean slate,” owing nothing. We know that life is not always ideal, but paying off debts is a great place to start for most Australians.

Pay Off Your Mortgage

If you own your home free and clear, you are free of what is usually the largest monthly financial responsibility for any family. It is a lot easier to enjoy retirement when you don’t have to make a house payment every month

Set Your Affairs in Order

This means filing a last will and testament. In the event of your untimely death, your heirs will need access to your money. Lack of a will can cause it to be tied up in court. It will save a lot of grief for your survivors.

Choosing a financial advisor in a city like Perth can be daunting. There are so many that it can be difficult to know who is legitimate and who isn’t. Sometimes it seems like anyone can hang a sign on a door and tell people they are a “financial advisor.” Here are some tips to finding the perfect financial advisor for your needs.

Trustworthy Firm

You want a financial advisor who works for a trustworthy firm. This can be a local firm or it can be a national firm. Whatever the case, you want your financial advisor to work with a firm that has a track record of success. You want a financial advisor whose company has much more to lose by misleading you than they have to gain.

Experience

You want an experienced financial advisor. If you do get a beginner, you want to make sure that they are being mentored by someone else in the company with a lot of experience. The stronger the company behind the advisor, the more likely it is that the advisor is subject to constant review and feedback to ensure high quality performance.

Results

You want a firm that has a great reputation for obtaining results for their clients. This is usually the result of a variety of factors, leading to the next requirement.

If you talk to any professional financial advisor in Perth, one of the first things they will suggest to you is that you create a budget and stick to it. A lot of people are overwhelmed at first, but if you use these five simple steps, it is a lot easier than you think. You may even become an expert.

Monitor all Spending

You want to know where every dollar of your money goes. Most people have no idea what they spend their money on and are shocked when they actually keep track of it for a month. If you have the last month’s receipts and bank statements, go through them. If not, document everything you spend for a month and then see what you come up with.

Add Up All of Your Debt

Make a list of every single debt you owe and who you owe it to. How much are you paying per month? Put your debts on a priority list, starting with the highest interest first.

Make a Realistic Budget

To be realistic, write down what you need first and then figure out how much it costs. Hopefully, it won’t be more than you make. The best scenario here is that you will find out you are spending a lot more than you need to and that you can have money left over to start paying off debts.

Financial planning doesn’t sound too difficult on the surface. In a city like Perth with high income level and a booming property market, one would think that we are all great at planning our budgets and finances. Recently, the owners of a website called Australia.CreditCards.com compiled the latest statistics about credit cards and debt.

The numbers should be enough to convince you that many of us could use some professional help in taking care of our finances.

Bankruptcy

Total personal financial insolvency rose 6.11% for the March 2014 quarter over the same period in 2013.* 4,932 Australians declared bankruptcy in the quarter, which was 3.31% more than the same quarter last year. Debt agreements for the March 2014 quarter rose to a record high of 2,678.

Western Australia, along with Queensland, had a record number of debt agreements in the March 2014 quarter. WA’s number of personal insolvency agreements rose 19.47% over the March quarter of last year.

Although we call it financial planning, a great part of what we do is retirement planning for our clients in the Perth area. If the recent Financial Services Inquiry (FSI) report is any indication, it will be even more important for every Australian to hire a financial planner at some time during the process of preparing for retirement.

While an increase in life expectancy is obviously seen as a very good development for most people, it has one major downside. Your retirement income has to last longer than it would with a shorter life expectancy.

The real surprise in the report is that Australians tend to underestimate their life expectancy by an average of seven years. Those who are 65 years of age and retiring can now have a reasonable expectation of living to be 90 years of age. One out of ten females who live to be 65 will live to be at least 100 according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ (ABS) Australian Life Tables (ALTs).

The Pitfalls of Retirement

If it were just a straight mathematical equation, it would be easy to figure out how much money each individual would need for retirement to sustain their preferred lifestyle. However, there are many factors that go into what will happen to your superannuation fund as you get further into your retirement years.

Why you may need income protection insurance and how to decide which level of cover you want.

If you are like most of us, you work for a living. Your income and livelihood depend upon being able to work every day. Most of us take it for granted that we will continue to be able to get up and go to work tomorrow and for many tomorrows to come. But what happens if you get sick or injured so badly that you can no longer work?

Who is going to pay your mortgage repayment? Your car payment? Who is going to buy food and pay the utility bills? If you have income protection insurance, you may receive up to 75% of your weekly income while you are unable to work. There are many different levels of coverage available, with the cost of the policy generally rising as the length of cover does.

How is Income Protection Insurance Different?

Income protection cover provides regular payments if you become unable to work. This helps you meet your monthly expenses. Life insurance pays your beneficiaries: not you. Total and Permanent Disability only pays when your disability is permanent. Trauma insurance pays for specific events or illnesses.

Those who offer financial planning services in Australia aren’t always the same. Many give blanket advice or try to fit every client into the same system of investing without first assessing their needs.

At Approved Financial Planners, we know that everyone’s situation is as different as their fingerprints and we go to great lengths to get all of the information we need to help you formulate a plan to get you where you want to be when you want to be there.

We strongly suggest advice from a Perth professional, but here are five DIY mistakes that we think it would be wise to avoid.

Not Doing Your Homework

Whatever you plan to use as an investment vehicle, your chances of success are usually proportionate with the knowledge you have amassed concerning that investment vehicle. If you don’t, you might as well be a welder trying to do heart surgery.

How to ease the transition to retirement pension by maximising what you already have.

Although we can’t give specific advice due to the individual nature of investing, we can provide some tips for easing the transition to retirement pension. As more Australians born during the baby boomer era reach retirement age, it is becoming more important to maximise your retirement opportunities. Here are some helpful tips.

Send Your Tax File Number (TFN) to Your Superannuation Fund

This is a fundamental, but failure to execute it can cost you thousands. If you fail to supply your super fund with your TFN, you pay a penalty tax on your concessional or before-tax contributions and you won’t be allowed to make non-concessional or after-tax contributions. Additionally, you won’t be eligible for the co-contribution scheme.

Combine Your Super Accounts

If you have different super accounts, you may be paying fees on each of them. Combining them into one fund could save a lot of money.

How to protect your family from the prospect of long term disability.

When we are planning our financial futures, we often focus on our income, our own lives and our retirement. But what about the lives of your children? Do you have an adult child who has just started a family or just bought a home? You have done your job well. You have raised children who are now adults. Maybe you have done well with investments and are winding down your career in anticipation of retirement.

Congratulations. We know your “job” as a parent is finished when your children become adults. However, we strongly suggest doing one more thing to help them protect their futures: ask them if they have protected their income yet.

If your adult child sustained an illness or injury that caused them long term disability and made them unable to produce income, would they be able to get by? It may be time to have a talk with your adult child and make sure their assets are protected.

Young families are often struggling to get by with mortgage repayments, rising costs of living and student loan repayments. Often, the last thing they are thinking of is insurance. This can be a huge mistake.

A financial planner’s role is to provide expert financial advice. While many people think that all a financial planner does is invest money, it’s more than that. A financial planner is there to help you devise a strategy for your present and future financial health. In other words, as opposed to just investing money, we want to help you use it to determine your future.

One of the reasons that ethical firms only provide general information on blog posts and brochures is because everyone’s financial situation is different. If someone just asks us for investment advice, we always tell them that we need more information first. One of the most important things we need to know is what goals you are trying to achieve.

We will want to know how much you plan to spend in the future and what you would like to spend it on. We want to know whether you enjoy your current line of work or if you want to retire as early as you can possibly make it happen.

For example, many people are very happy in their chosen profession and plan to work as long as they are physically able. On the other hand, some walk into work every day dreaming about retirement. It is our job to help you turn your dreams into reality. Many people, for example, make the shift from their profession to being successful property investors.