Why financial planning is for life, not just for New Year

Happy New Year! 

You probably spent the last few weeks of December eating mince pies for breakfast and changing out of one set of PJs before getting straight into another. Chances are, you’re still 50% Bucks Fizz. And yet every January you’re somehow expected to completely turn your life around as soon as the clock strikes midnight on NYE. 

New Year’s Resolutions are famously hard to keep, but that doesn’t stop us setting them. Losing weight, drinking less, reading more, you’re probably working with an almost identical list year after year. 

But why are New Year’s Resolutions so difficult to keep? And how can we make plans that stick – particularly when it comes to our finances?

January is the worst time of year to try and change your life

For self-improvement enthusiasts, January can be an exciting time for reinvention and change. For everyone else, it’s the most depressing month of the year. The weather’s terrible, it’s hard to fit into our jeans and our bank accounts have become desolate wastelands.

Three weeks into the year we even have ‘Blue Monday’ aka ‘the most depressing day of the year’. There’s no actual science behind it, of course. It was created back in 2005 by Sky Travel to encourage people to cheer themselves up by booking a holiday. 

Today, marketers use Blue Monday to sell us all sorts of things from spa breaks to concert tickets. So if you’re struggling to stick to your money saving goals this January, don’t beat yourself up. It’s hard to avoid impulse purchases when you’re being sold to at every turn.

Adding to your life, rather than taking away

Perhaps our attempts at self-improvement would be more effective if we eased ourselves in gently and focused on adding to our lives, rather than taking our favourite things away? 

This is where financial planning comes in. A good financial planner won’t sit you down and list everything that’s wrong with you. We won’t tap into your insecurities. We won’t print out your bank statements before crossing off all the ‘bad’ purchases with a red pen. 

Instead, we’ll work together to identify what’s most important to you and what you can do without. 

A goal without a plan is just a wish

New Year’s Resolutions are often based on trends and fads. Over on TikTok, New Year’s Resolutions themselves have been replaced with ‘ins and outs’ this year. 

In the ‘in’ column, you can find goals such as ‘being on time’ and ‘thrifting’. In the ‘out’ column are actions such as ‘working too much’ and ‘people pleasing’.

As Ana Diaz writes for Pelogon: “TikTok effectively commodifies a list of personal goals and turns it into yet another consumable piece of content that can reap as many as one million views and 170,000 likes.

“And while these lists don’t focus on specific product recommendations, they still are trying to ‘sell’ you on a particular lifestyle.”

Whether you’re a fan of the traditional New Year’s Resolution or you prefer an ‘in and out’ approach to 2024, we think it’s admirable that you’re looking for ways to improve and grow. 

But there’s little point in listing all the things you’re going to do (or not do) in 2024 if you don’t have a solid and actionable plan to help you achieve them. The good news is that we can help with this! Okay, we can’t help you get a six pack or stop smoking, but we can help with the money stuff.

Financial planning is about avoiding trends and fads in favour of tried and tested methods. Rather than looking for quick wins, we prioritise consistent and achievable actions designed to help you build wealth and improve your lifestyle. No deprivation necessary.

It may not be exciting or showy like announcing you’re doing Dry January, but it’s consistent, low effort, and actually achievable.

Automating new behaviours

It used to be said that it takes 21 days to form a new habit, but just like Blue Monday, that turned out to be a myth too. Behaviour change is complicated and challenging. To change your behaviour, you need to disrupt a current habit while simultaneously nurturing a new set of actions which might be completely alien to you. 

Even reading James Clear’s Atomic Habits will only get you so far. Within weeks of putting the book down, you can still find yourself picking up the 3 for 2 chocolates at the checkout. You might struggle to muster the motivation to go to the gym. 

Unlike good health behaviours, good financial behaviours can be much easier to automate. You can set up standing orders to your savings, automate your investments and set annual reminders to review your insurance policies. 

And with a financial planner at your side, there’s very little you need to do yourself. We’ll create the financial plan for you, we’ll build your portfolio for you, find the right protection and plan your estate and taxes. 

Your finances will keep ticking away in the background, while you get on with living your life. 

It’s a bit like those electric ab stimulators that used to promise you a six pack while all you did was watch TV - except with us, it actually works.