How to Manage Your Finances in Middle Age

Your financial health is of the utmost importance to secure your lifestyle preferences for the future. Without the kind of mature and reasoned planning of your personal and home economics, you can hit bumps in the road that can lead you into debt, and financial anxiety may accompany your every move. Happily, taking control of your individual finances is a simple process – and one which you can learn quickly with the help of a few tips. Those tips are provided below, ensuring that you’re able to make the most of your life in middle age, drawing on your financial wisdom to support the lifestyle you wish to lead.

Budgeting

Now, you’ve lived enough years to know how to budget. You’re long in the tooth enough to know that frivolous spending means you don’t have the cash to invest in your home, or in holidays and other treats that your family can look forward to. Nonetheless, if you’re not maintaining a fairly strict budget, and keeping tabs on your finances, you can descend into debt and endless overdraft fees rather quickly. 

Budgeting shouldn’t be a chore – it’s a brief journey through your spending across the course of a month. Often, seeing how much you’re saving can be a positive and exciting experience – guaranteeing fun and expensive luxuries in the future. But you’ll also be able to spot financial mismanagement in your accounts – which is crucial to detect and remove from your financial life sooner rather than later.  Don’t forget that your bank can help you with your budgeting and special needs financial planning. , and there’s plenty of budgeting apps out there to help you understand your finances. 

Making Investments

The interest rates in most bank accounts and savings accounts are notoriously low at present. With little incentive to keep large amounts of wealth in these accounts, it’s far better for you to invest your capital in a way that suits you and your lifestyle. There’s plenty you can invest your excess cash in, for instance:

• Property, which you can use as a second home, rent out, or ‘do-up’ and sell for profit
• Stocks and shares in something stable and in slow growth
• Vintage and appreciating items, such as old motor vehicles, clothes, or antiques
• Art – which can appreciate greatly in value, and will look great within your home
• New skills and certifications – which can directly help you move on in your career

With so many investment options for your excess cash, the only indecision you should have is exactly where to invest – and how much. This, you can do with advice from friends, family and specialists in the investment industry. 

Managing a Mortgage

You know you’re middle aged when you’re half-way towards paying off your mortgage, and these payments are less stressful due to your job security and guaranteed income. Nevertheless, it’s important to monitor your mortgage payments in order to fully understand the benefits of reducing or increasing these payments, based on your income and the amount of excess cash that you’re accumulating. Remember that your own home is an investment too – and one that’ll hold and accumulate value as you grow older. 

Meanwhile, you can also manage your cash in the opposite way – by withdrawing some of the money you’ve paid into your mortgage through an equity release. Individuals choose to enact an equity release for various reasons – including simply to go on a holiday or invest in new furniture – but they key here is to find great advice to help you make a success of this method of wealth generating. Look to the experts at EquityRelease.co.uk for advice to help you with some of these key decisions.

Getting on Top of Bills

Well, now for the least exciting tip – but the one that can save you money if you’re on top of throughout your adult life. Bills are a constant companion in middle age, dropping through your letterbox with regularity and asking you to part with your cash in order to keep you with running water, electricity, heating and various other forms of freedom. You need to make a folder with all of these bill letters and receipts, and understand how you can manage them, in order to make a long-term and healthy financial future for you and your partner.

The best way to get on top of bills is to pay them immediately, and to set up direct debits and standing orders that manage these transactions for you. Bear in mind that better deals may be available online, too – and that you can use price comparison websites to drive down the cost of these bills. 

There you have it: some key tips to guarantee your financial health in middle age.

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