While we all hope and often believe it won’t happen to us, the reality is that people throughout Ireland are affected by unexpected illness and premature deaths every day.
Great financial planning is all about ensuring your family is protected financially in worst case scenarios. Wealth management does not only involve ‘making money’ and creating investment portfolios. We need to set secure foundations in place to cover the essentials first before we start to add the building blocks to accumulate our wealth.
Ironically most of us insure our houses and our cars but we sometimes fail to put in place insurance to protect our biggest asset of all, our income, our ability to work. When Children are involved this becomes especially important to consider.
We can all imagine the stress and problems that would follow from either yours or your spouse’s income stopping suddenly and unexpectedly. From having to worry about how bills are going to be paid, to thinking about how to keep the roof over your heads, life would be a lot easier if you could guarantee financial security. For this reason, the most important factor to be considered in financial planning is life insurance and/or critical illness insurance, to protect your family’s lifestyle.
One method of identifying a good level of cover is to see how much income you would want to replace in order to maintain financial security. There are many different ways to calculate how much cover is needed but a good rule of thumb is to purchase a policy that would allow your family to live off the capital of the pay-out – use a budget to find out how much your family spends annually, then work backwards to determine the adequate level of cover.
A family protection plan can be used to protect you and your family from the financial uncertainty and hardship that comes with unexpected illness or death. For a very small proportion of your income, you can put a financial protection in place to ensure you and your family would have the money needed if these unfortunate events should happen to you.
There are many types of protection and all the options available can be very confusing and complicated. It’s important to understand the different types of protection so you can make your decisions with confidence.
If you would like assistance to identify an adequate level of protection, identify an appropriate term for the policy or select a suitable type of insurance please contact either Adrian or Tracy on adrian@oaktreefinancial.ie / tracy@oaktreefinancial.ie or call on 025 30588
Adrian Godwin is a Senior Financial Consultant and the co-founder and managing director of Oaktree Financial Services. With a background in accounting and tax advising, Adrian specialises in estate planning and wealth management.Adrian offers clients reassurance through best practice solutions. His unique skill set and qualifications enable clients to develop comprehensive life plans that align with their goals.
