Reasons Why You Must Plan Your Finances

Before you embark on your savings and investment journey, you need to start with a sound financial plan. A financial plan helps you identify your goals and objectives, quantify them, and create an investment strategy to achieve them. A financial plan also helps you plan for unforeseen risks, premature death, and life-threatening illnesses. In simple words, your financial plan acts as a roadmap, offering precise directions on how to proceed with investments and ensure long-term financial stability. This article outlines the reasons why you should plan your finances and create a financial plan.

• Financial planning helps plan and manage income, debt, emergency expenses, and insurance coverage for long-term financial stability.
• Comprehensive financial planning helps optimise investments and select the right assets to achieve your long-term goals.
• A financial plan is instrumental in creating a systematic approach to retirement planning.

Here’s a list of reasons why financial planning is necessary for every earning individual:

Control cash flow

One of the most important reasons to plan your finances is to ensure proper income management. Without a proper financial plan and budget, you risk spending your entire monthly cash flow. Creating a financial plan that accounts for your income inflows and outflows helps you limit overstepping, account for savings, and avoid living from paycheck to paycheck.
 

Helps debt management

Financial planning also plays a vital role in efficient debt management. You may have availed of loans at different points in your life to finance your education and home purchase or used credit cards to finance big-ticket purchases. In the absence of proper planning, these liabilities could easily become debt traps. Creating a financial plan helps you systematically tackle debt, starting with high-interest debt. You can create repayment plans for your outstanding debts, dedicating a fixed sum monthly towards this goal.
 

Prudent investment planning

One of the chief reasons to plan your finances is to streamline your investment approach. Investing without a financial plan is equivalent to investing without a purpose. A financial plan essentially offers grounding and direction to your investment strategies and portfolio. By outlining your goals and objectives, your financial plan helps you pick the right investment approach, decide on the time horizon, and calculate risk exposure.
 

Enhance your quality of life

The act of planning your finances helps rationalise your financial standing, invariably improving your quality of life. For instance, creating an emergency fund to cover urgent expenses or opting for a life insurance plan to ensure the financial stability of your loved ones has a positive impact on your quality of life. In simple words, with a proper financial plan in place, you can go through life without feeling overburdened with worry.
 

Ensure financial stability

As mentioned earlier, financial stability is one of the key reasons behind financial planning. A financial plan helps you focus on the possibilities of unexpected circumstances and prepare for the same beforehand. With a contingency fund in place, you can tackle emergency situations like job loss or urgent home repairs without feeling financially compromised. In other words, you can tackle emergency expenses without giving up on your financial security and long-term goals.
 

Build your savings corpus

The easiest way to build a savings corpus is by implementing a financial plan. While it’s completely possible to save without a plan, doing so doesn’t really help you maximise your saving potential. If you want a systematic way to save, start with a comprehensive financial plan where you outline your saving targets, goals, and how you plan to achieve them. Drafting a financial plan essentially gives you insights into your income and expenses to rationalise the savings process.
 

Ensure appropriate asset allocation

Asset allocation is the act of selecting the right assets to include in your portfolio. Since your financial plan outlines your goals, risk tolerance, and time horizon, it plays an instrumental role in determining the right asset allocation. Not every asset offers the same return on investment, and neither does it carry the same risk exposure. For instance, equities offer a high return potential but also high risk exposure, while fixed-income instruments like bonds offer lower returns against lower risk exposure. Financial planning helps you understand the right asset mix as per your subjective factors. It also helps you diversify your investments to ride through market turbulence without compromising on returns.
 

Get proper insurance coverage

Planning your finances helps you protect the financial stability of both you and your loved ones. The right insurance coverage can be a boon at the time of a medical emergency or the sudden demise of a family member. Having a health insurance policy in place helps you cover medical costs without dipping into your savings and liquidating your investments. Similarly, a life cover protects your dependents’ standard of living and helps them clear any outstanding debts. Your financial plan takes your current financial situation and expenses into account to determine the right insurance coverage for you.
 

Achieve long-term goals

All financial experts agree on the importance of financial planning in achieving long-term goals. Your financial plan outlines the dreams and goals you wish to achieve 10, 20, or 30 years down the line and chalks out the path to achieving them. It lays down guidelines on how to best use your money to achieve these goals. In simple words, your financial plan dictates your savings, investment, time frame, and returns required to fulfil your goals, like funding your child’s education, buying a home, or planning retirement.
 

Secure your retirement

To ensure fiscal security in your golden years, financial planning in the early days is necessary. Embarking early on the planning journey helps you efficiently manage your income, savings, and investments to build a sizable corpus for your post-retirement years. Proper financial planning helps you estimate living expenses and factor in inflation to target a realistic and adequate retirement corpus that can help you maintain your lifestyle even without a monthly salary. According to your retirement needs, you can invest in pension and annuity plans to enjoy a stable income in your post-earning days. 

Understanding the reasons why you must plan your finances can make a world of difference in your financial standing as well as your quality of life in the long run. Remember that prudent financial planning acts as the bedrock of your investment journey, helping you attain your set milestones in a timely and organised manner. It may be prudent to consult a professional advisor if you find it challenging to undertake financial planning right at the beginning of your career. Remember, the secret lies in putting your financial plan into action at the earliest.
 

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