Five financial planning tricks that you need in your life

At Planswell, we consider ourselves the world’s greatest financial planning company for good reason. Not only do we make financial planning free and easy for everyone, the quality of our financial plans is better than anything that has existing before.

Here are five tricks that allow us to create a better financial plan for you:

If you’re saving for retirement, you might be planning to start withdrawing your savings somewhere around age 65. But you’re not just saving for age 65, because you’ll probably also need to withdraw some money when you’re 75 and 85 too. Heck, nowadays, the odds of making it to 105 are better than ever.

A Planswell financial plan considers when you’ll actually need each individual dollar and assign it the right place in your portfolio. We’ll invest the money you’ll need sooner more cautiously, and the money you’ll need later more aggressively. This is a clever way to increase your overall return potential without taking extra risk.

The amount you can save each month and the level of income you’ll want in retirement are closely related to your current salary. Traditional financial planners usually assume that your salary will increase along with the cost of living, but is that really accurate?

A Planswell financial plan recognizes that some people have slow but steady wage growth, while others see rapid increases, such as a doctor moving from residency to practice, or a police officer whose salary can double in the first five years on the job. To solve this, we’ll ask you to quickly update your plan every six months and make sure we’re always working with your actual income number.

The job of life insurance is to replace someone’s income if they pass away. Many traditional financial planners will look at a couple and recommend matching insurance policies, but there’s a big problem with that. If we were talking about a $500,000 insurance policy, that might be enough for an aggressive investor to generate $30,000 of annual income, whereas his or her more conservative spouse might only able to generate $10,000 of annual income.

A Planswell financial plan considers the unique risk profile of each partner and recommends the optimal amount of protection. That way, if someone were to pass away, the survivor would have enough money to invest in the way they feel comfortable and still maintain their standard of living.

Financial advisors sell investments. Insurance agents sell insurance. Mortgage brokers sell mortgages. But why should these be treated as separate things when they are all closely related and have a major impact on your personal finances?

A Planswell financial plan integrates everything. Take your mortgage for example. Since we know how your balance will decline over time, we can reduce your insurance along with it. And since we know when your mortgage will be paid off, we can plan to direct more money to your investments at that time. That’s just one small example of how we make all the parts fit together to save you money and maximize your wealth.

Traditional financial planning is like shooting an arrow at a very distant target. You take aim, shoot, and wait years to find out if you hit it. Over such a great distance, even a small error in your aim will cause you to miss your target by a country mile.

With a Planswell financial plan, you only need to aim for the next six months. At that time, if something has changed in your life, or if your investments have done a little better or a little worse than we expected, we simply update and adjust your plan. These small, incremental changes twice a year are the secret to hitting the bullseye every single time.

Financial planning is a broad term. Not everyone defines it the same way, and nobody does it quite the way we do at Planswell. Why? Part of it is the power of our patent-pending financial planning technology.