Establishing your long-term financial objectives is central to creating an effective wealth management strategy. To be best placed to have an accurate and effective plan for your money, it is important to understand what your regular outgoings are. This way you have a good idea of how much surplus income you may have to channel towards you and your family’s future, before thinking about the investment products that might suit you best.

Knowing your regular outgoings

Typical large, routine expenses can include property rental costs or servicing a mortgage, nursery fees, school fees, or helping your children with the significant cost of attending university. Being able to continue making these payments is a typical first objective when managing monthly finances. In addition to these regular fixed costs, it is prudent to have a picture of your monthly expenses that might be a bit more variable in nature, and how long they will last.

Taking stock of your position

Having considered expenses, you may then be in a position to put any surplus income to work, in pursuit of your long-term financial objectives. With a plethora of investment options, it can be difficult to know where to start. Whether you consider stocks, bonds, exchange traded funds (ETFs), or a managed portfolio, it can be a good idea to first ask some key questions around your long-term investing and borrowing, such as:

• Should you contribute more to your pension to take advantage of potential tax relief?
• If you have a mortgage, should you consider overpaying it with the objective of saving on total interest costs?
• Should you contribute to your tax-wrapped Stocks and Shares Individual Savings Account (ISA) before contributing to Junior ISAs (JISAs) for your kids?
• Or should you contribute to JISAs first to harness the power of compounding for your children as early as possible?

There are a lot of unknowns when it comes to long-term financial objectives, but asking yourself questions like these can be a good place to start if you have surplus monthly income or a lump sum you are due to receive.

While this guide doesn’t constitute personalised financial advice, we aim to set out some of the options that are available to you and your family. We firmly believe that the better view you have of your and your family’s overall wealth picture and long-term objectives, the clearer the future path could be.

If you think you could benefit from speaking to someone about the options available to you, you can book a call with our wealth experts for financial guidance. This is a free service, offering a general overview of how investing works and which products could be the right choice, but will not factor in your personal circumstances.

Risk warning

As with all investing, your capital is at risk. The value of your portfolio can go down or up and you may get back less than you invest. Tax rules vary by individual status and may change.