Mid-Career Financial Planning
If you’re like many Americans, you’ve been running simultaneous rat races; the career race, the marriage race, the raising children race, and others and you’ve accumulated assets, liabilities, and still have important financial goals ahead of you.
It’s time to take stock of what you have: to determine what’s working and make sure you’re on track to get you where you want to go. After all, that’s what you do at work, right? You make sure your area of corporate responsibility is working optimally. It’s time to make sure your personal financial operation works as efficiently as your work operation.
Mid-Career Is a Good Time for a Financial Checkup
You are on a lifetime financial journey. That includes your early career, mid-career, preretirement, and retirement stages of your financial life. You can have more control over your financial destiny by taking more control of your financial life today.
By your mid-career you may have accumulated many different accounts, each serving its own distinct purpose; a mortgage/home, investments, insurance, multiple jobs (and multiple retirement accounts?) credit cards . Do they serve your needs optimally? Let’s explore some reasons why mid-career is a good time for a financial checkup.
Find an Advisor
- Shop Around – Like any product you purchase, financial products change and that means you have options, perhaps better options than you did when you purchased the financial product some years ago. You would comparison shop for any product you own (cars, appliances, vacations, etc.) so why not for financial products?
- Your Increased Value Outpaced Your Static Coverage – If your paycheck has increased in the last 20 years at work, it’s likely your household expenses have also increased. Has your life and/or disability insurance coverage increased commensurately? If it hasn’t, your family may be exposed to financial risk you previously covered but have now outgrown.
- Too Many Retirement Accounts – How many jobs with retirement plans have you had and have you consolidated those plans into one to simplify your life–perhaps even converting them to a Roth IRA so you’d never have to pay taxes on that money again?
There’s financial work you can do to help you achieve the tax, retirement, children’s education funding, and estate goals you may be pursuing. While each of the items noted above serves a different purpose, each also plays a role in the efficiency of your lifetime financial journey.
You should know what you have and that it’s serving you well today because you’ve critiqued it periodically with an eye to improve it. Improving it helps to improve you.
Taking Financial Stock
The more routinely you do it the less there may be to improve and the easier it may be. You know the rhyme: by the inch it’s a cinch, by the yard it’s hard. If it’s been 20 years since you last took stock of all of your financial accounts, it may take longer to assess what you have and the options you may identify to improve your financial position but that may just make the exercise that much more rewarding–because you can make so much improvement.
Next Steps?
You can do a lot of this work on your own or you can hire a financial professional for help. Here’s one place to start, a university-developed quiz to help score where you are. Once you know where you are and why you’re there, you can take steps to improve your position today and your overall financial journey.
Take Our Quick Financial Quiz
How financially literate are you compared to the average American? You can take one of the shortest of those financial literacy quizzes here (it’s only 6 questions) to get a taste of the questions asked.
Take Our Quiz