Family planning meets financial planning
Family planning meets financial planning
23 June 2021
When do nappies form part of your financial goals?
We are grateful to one of our clients who penned his thoughts on financial planning prior to the birth of his first baby.
We’re three weeks away from welcoming our new bundle of joy into the world. Hurrah!
A probable eight-pound baby. And it feels like he’ll leave us with about that much left in the bank!
When I think about how much time we’ve spent planning what he needs – from nappies to night lights, cuddly toys to cellular blankets – I realise that we’ve only spent a fraction of that time on what he’ll need financially.
Or more to point, what we’ll need financially.
For the last few years, we’ve always discussed being ‘financially secure’ by the time we have our first child.
I remember feeling that whatever we had saved, or would come to save in the future, somehow wouldn’t be enough.
Even with a blank cheque in my hand I sometimes think I’d still feel the same.
I’m not quite sure what ‘financially secure’ actually means, but for us it meant us both being in good jobs, being able to save for the future, and owning our own home.
But it was six months ago when we suddenly thought, maybe ‘financially secure’ needed to have some goals attached to it.
Would this unborn baby, who we hadn’t even met yet, want to go to university? Would he want a wedding? Or would he want a springboard to help start his own business?
Making hypothetical decisions for him felt very strange.
As I look back six months on, with the bulk of our initial spending behind us (a loft conversion and buying baby bits), I’m reassured by the insights and graphs following our financial planning meeting.
These paint a picture of a strong enough financial foundation for us, and for our child.
We’ve come to learn on this journey that ‘financially secure’ is about setting goals that are both ambitious and achievable, that will give us – and our child – the lives that we want to live and share together.
And, most importantly, it’s about setting and achieving these goals with our new bundle of joy in our arms.