- Published on 11 Aug 2015
- - What is Financial Planning?
You spend the years between the ages of 22 and 65 working. Using that time, you build all the wealth that you will need in order to;
• buy a home,
• get married,
• have children,
• go on holidays,
• educate the children,
• help out family,
• have a social life,
• take long service leave and
• plan and save for retirement.
On the basis that males live to 81 on average and females, 84, the following gets our lives into perspective.
We will spend;
• 33.33% of our time or 27 years asleep.
• 28.57% of our time or 23.14 years enjoying the weekend
• 19.75% of our time or 16 years in retirement for males and 22.62% or 19 years of our lives in retirement
• 16.67% of our time or 13.50 years relaxing in the evenings.
• 4.17% of our time or 3.38 years (males spend eating) and 3.50 (females spend eating)
• 1.3% of our lives or 1.05 years are spent commuting to and from the office
And to fund all of this including the 16 years in retirement for men and 19 for women,males spend 8.31% (females spend 6.73% of their lives at work) of our time on this earth setting ourselves up to do everything else.
And this assumes we had paid work throughout our adult lives from graduation at 22 through to retirement at 65.
To get this into perspective, we spend around 7% of our available hours in our lifetime working and saving to fund the 93% of the hours we have to spend with friends and loved ones.
No wonder having a good financial plan is critical to your longer term wealth and well-being.
A critical aspect to any decent financial plan is to prioritise your needs and goals. I am not suggesting for one minute that you not go out for a beer or buy a bunch of flowers for the house. What I am suggesting is that if you don’t think about what you want to do in your life, the “profit” from work can slip through your hands like the sand in an hourglass.