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When you’re younger, maybe in your late teens or early 20s, it’s really easy to ignore that the future will happen. I know because this was me at those ages. In fact, it was me in my late 20s as well. To be completely honest it wasn’t until I met John, bought a house and started a family that I really started to think about certain things. Death isn’t a nice subject but it’s one we need to think about carefully and plan for.
Wills
So what can you do to plan for the future? Something to really consider is getting a will organised if you don’t already have one. They are fairly easy to have done and you can leave copies with loved ones or friends to ensure that someone knows what to do and what you want if something bad happens. Wills are really important if you have children or a partner who rely on you financially to ensure they are looked after. Also, if you don’t have a will anything could get shared out in a way that you might not want. Without a will children or partners could be left in really stressful situations on top of whatever else may have happened and a will could stop that from happening.
Life Insurance
Something we have had in place for some time now is life insurance. I think we organised this when we bought our house 6 years ago but now I realise that we really should have done it a lot sooner. There are various types of life insurance available and there are different kinds of pay outs. LifeSearch off something called Family Income Benefit which is a bit different to a regular life insurance. Instead of paying out a lump sum of money if someone passes away the Family Income Benefit pays a regular amount either monthly or quarterly. If you would like to provide someone with a regular income if you pass away then this might be the option for you. You can have a regular life insurance policy too if you wish though.
Finances
As you get older your thoughts about money will probably change. Mine definitely have and mostly in the last 5 years or so. We are working hard to put ourselves in a better financial position now while we are still able to. We do unfortunately have some debts but realising that we needed to do something sensible we tried to work with creditors to work out payment plans and freeze interest while we pay of balances. It’s going to be a while until we are debt free (not counting the mortgage) but at least we’re working on it.
Mortgage over payments
If you are in a good position financially already then you might want to think about making over payments on your mortgage if you are able to. Small extra payments can make a big difference the interest you pay overall, bringing down the amount you pay back in total. Of course, if you are able to make those extra payments it will take time off of your mortgage. At the minute we have 24 years and 1 month left on our mortgage and I would love to work towards getting that down a bit. Once we have cleared our debts we will be putting some money aside each month to be able to do this.
What steps have you taken to plan for the future?
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This is really a helpful article. Thank you for sharing it.