Four Steps to Successful Wealth Management – It’s easy to assume that once you reach a certain level of financial affluence, things become easy. But the reality is that looking after your assets – never mind making them work for you and grow – is a complex business.
Seeking help from certified wealth management professionals can make all the difference in how you use your assets to achieve your life goals. Read on to find out how.
What is wealth management?
Wealth management focuses on two key areas – the preservation of wealth and the use of assets to achieve desired goals (including generating more wealth). It’s distinct from financial planning in two key respects:
Wealth management services are tailored towards the needs of high-net-worth individuals who already have significant assets, whereas financial planning is geared towards anyone who wants to take a strategic approach to fund life goals.
Financial planning tends to focus on the day-to-day, looking at things like cost-cutting and spending strategies to create room for savings and investment.
Wealth management focuses more on the future, as the people who access wealth management services already have the means to invest, or else want to structure their assets to achieve specific goals. It covers everything an individual might want to do with their wealth, from investing it for growth, funding pensions and retirement, putting aside resources for later life care, and planning their estate for tax-efficient bequests to children and other beneficiaries.
How to achieve your wealth management goals
Choose a specialist with the right pedigree
Wealth management is a specialist field, and it requires expertise in several different financial disciplines.
This broad range demonstrates how complex a field of wealth management is. High net-worth individuals are very often skilled and prudent financial operators. But when you dip into areas like investment markets and funds, trust rules and regulations and so on, you are crossing between several highly technical fields.
Professional wealth management specialists provide all the requisite expertise in a single place. As chartered wealth management practitioners with a multi-award-winning team, Fiducia Wealth has the credentials, the experience, and the proven pedigree to be worthy of our client’s trust. As the leading specialists in wealth management in Essex, their track record in helping thousands of clients achieve their financial goals is second to none.
Identify your financial priorities
It’s not always easy to know what you want to achieve with your wealth. Most of us would like to be able to grow our assets through shrewd investment, but then again, are we prepared to take the risks that might entail? We all want to fund a comfortable retirement, but what kind of lifestyle do we see ourselves living in retirement? And what about the legacy we leave behind to our children and loved ones?
It is the job of wealth management professionals to translate these life goals into financial goals with a discovery meeting, to find out about you and your aspirations. Wealth management in Essex offers a complimentary initial meeting and will make a proposal as to the financial strategies that they believe will enable you to achieve your goals, and you can decide whether to appoint them on that basis.
Work on a strategy
In our ordinary day-to-day lives, we don’t always think strategically about what we spend and the way that we use money. Once you have pinned down your long-term financial goals, it becomes easier to use your money and assets in a more strategic manner. You have an endgame in mind, an overarching purpose for everything you do.
Find the right balance
In the example above of having your heart set on lavish early retirement, the temptation is to think you must go all-in to realise your dream. Whatever you must spare, throw it into high-return, high-risk investments. If you don’t roll the dice, your opportunity might be gone.
This is never the right approach to investment strategy. We all have our own tolerance to financial risk, depending on what our financial circumstances and aspirations are. But successful wealth management is never about gambling. It’s about steady accumulation in the long term, with a sensible balance between speculation and preservation.
You might have to adjust your timeframes and aim for that early retirement in 15 years rather than 10. But surely that is better than taking a risk that goes wrong and not achieving your dream at all? And what about other considerations, like leaving a legacy to your children?
As wealth management specialists, it’s their job to guide you through the maze of financial risk. Ultimately, their job is not to create wealth, it’s to use your wealth to achieve your goals.
Poppy Watt