About You

For any long-term goal – be it sport, a career, or a hobby – the earlier you craft a financial plan and begin to focus on what’s important, the greater your chance of achieving that goal. By starting your investment journey early, your money has more time to grow and work for you.

The act of buying your first home involves many years of planning, saving for a deposit, estimating your future salary to project potential borrowing, and more. Meeting a financial planner early can help bring all of these variables under a single, easy-to-manage plan.

Finally, protection and life insurance products are priced more attractively for younger people, as the risk to the insurer tends to be less.  With so much uncertainty ahead, putting in place some low-cost protection at this age could be the most cost effective way to insure against the uncertain and the unforeseen. 

As we reach our thirties, life very quickly becomes much more complicated. You may be fully-focused on your career, but you’re likely also looking to buy your first home or step up a rung on the ladder. You may be thinking about a joint plan with a partner or starting a family. The importance of pension planning is starting to become clear.

As your income grows, so too do your mortgage debts. This could be a good time to revisit your protection arrangements to ensure they are still suitable.

Forty is the age that we often see clients first have that “ah ha!” moment; the point where the need for proper financial planning becomes most apparent. By this point you are  doing well in your career. You may now have a growing family and might be thinking of planning for school fees. Retirement is on the far horizon, but it’s something you know you should look into, even if it’s to confirm that you are on track and bring into focus what your retirement will look like.

Many of our clients at forty are looking to scale up their earnings from their job for a better quality of life. Investing is a great way to do this. Depending on your career, you may now be an additional-rate taxpayer and have seen your tax bill rise significantly. Eclipse Financial Planning can help refine your existing financial plan to ensure your overall accumulation plan is as tax-efficient as possible.

At fifty, your retirement planning should be set, although if it isn’t, we can still help. This may involve consolidating your pensions from previous jobs and helping you understand what pensions you actually have. Having discussions about what a good retirement looks like to you is imperative at fifty. If there is a shortfall, then we can work out how you can bridge this and arrange a suitable investment plan to overcome it.

Many people want to enter retirement mortgage-free, and with our mortgage service we can ensure we give you the best chance of doing this

Will planning, if not already done so, is essential at fifty to ensure assets are passed on in the way you would want, should anything happen. For a similar reason, we like to review our clients’ protection policies at this stage, as by now it is usually too late to recover from a significant shortfall.

You may want to start thinking about inheritance plans, but don’t want to give up control too early. Trusts can be a very good way to do this.

Many clients come to us in their sixties, looking for help and worried that it might be too late. More often than not, it isn’t. By this age, there is an extensive list of different ways in which we could help depending on your own individual journey.

We can help make sense of what you have in terms of assets, in pensions or other accounts, what investments you have. We can look into bringing everything together, under a consolidated plan to best support you in retirement.

Once settled into retirement, inheritance starts to become a primary focus. As you are aware of what will be left, you may want to think about the legacy you leave to the next generation. Thorough planning can help reduce taxes, with the added benefit of retaining greater control of those assets.