Financial Planning

Our clients approach us with a range of challenges,

- I need a mortgage and don’t know where to start
- I want to protect my family in the case of serious illness or premature death
- Are my current financial products the best / cheapest in the market?
- What’s the best way to save money for short-term needs?
- I need to plan for when I’m older and retired

On their own, some of the above might seem challenging to you. Put a few challenges together and the picture can seem overwhelming!

You can’t predict the future, but you can plan for it.

We help our customers every day to get a structured financial plan in place to address challenges such as these. We start by listening to you (and asking lots of questions!). The better we can understand what you want to achieve and where you are today, the more that we can help you.

We then take this information away, make sense of it and come back to you with proposed solutions. When you are happy with these, we then act on your instructions and put any products required in place. As we are completely independent of any institution, we can find the very best solution to meet your specific needs.

We will then work with you into the future, making sure that you keep going in the right direction financially, to ensure your financial goals are ultimately achieved.

Life Assurance

As Benjamin Franklin once said, “There are only two things certain in life, death and taxes”. While neither are topics that anyone enjoys, there are steps you can take to reduce the financial impact of either of them. If you earn an income, own a home, have a family a business or an investment property, then protecting you and your family against the financial impact of ill health or death is one of the most important decisions you can make.

A death of a loved one is of course a catastrophic event for a family. When such an event happens, the last thing needed is for the surviving family to have to worry about money. At First Rate Financial Planning, we can help you remove the financial worry should a death happen in your family. We help you plan to:

- Provide immediate financial security for your family, in the event of your death.
- Pay off your mortgage and other debts in the event of your death or that of your spouse.
- Ensure a surviving spouse is not forced to return to work, so as to pay for day to day living expenses, as a result of the loss of income to the house caused by a death.

We will help you to identify the risks, to quantify the impact of them and plan how to deal with them. We also review any existing products that you have and make sure that you have the right products in place to achieve financial security for you, your family and other dependants.

We will see if we can save you money on the products that you currently have in place. While we always endeavour to get the most competitive price for our clients, our main focus is on making sure you get the most comprehensive cover for your money.

If you would like to find out more about how we can help you remove the financial worry of a death in the family and to ensure the financial security for you and your family, please give us a call.

Specified Illness Protection

Getting sick is a cause of worry for many families today.

Is it likely to happen? Well hopefully not, but according to the National Cancer Registry Ireland, there are more than 20,000 new cancer cases in Ireland each year. In addition, approximately 10,000 Irish people have a stroke each year, and there are approx. 30,000 people living in the community with disabilities as a result of a stroke according to The Irish Heart Foundation.

Of course surviving these illnesses is good news! However careful planning is also needed to enable you to recover without having to worry about money.

You may need access to additional cash to pay for care at home, possibly to adapt your home, or to buy medical equipment that will assist your recovery or improve your quality of life. Indeed specified illness cover is often linked to a mortgage, paying off some or your entire mortgage in the event of you getting sick.

Specified illness cover, sometimes known as serious illness cover or critical illness cover is a product designed to remove the financial worry when you suffer one of a specified list of serious illnesses. Specified illness cover has been a very popular addition to the protection portfolios of clients in Ireland for the last 20 or so years, the attraction of it being the availability of an immediate lump sum in the event of a claim.

If you would like to find out more about how we can help you remove the financial worry of a serious illness in your family, please give us a call.

Income Protection

We all fund our lifestyle by spending our hard-earned income. This income is used to feed ourselves, to pay mortgages, to pay all the bills and to fund our lifestyles; new clothes, nights out and (hopefully!) holidays etc.

Our income is also used to pay our insurance premiums and hopefully to pay towards retirement planning. So what happens if we get sick or have an accident and this income stops? This is where income protection insurance comes in.

For some lucky few individuals, their employer provides this cover. For many others, they may be reliant on state benefits, which currently stands at €188 per week. Could you continue to pay your bills and live your lifestyle on this amount? Unfortunately for the self-employed, they are entitled to nothing from the state, and as a result need to put their own income protection insurance in place.

Income protection insurance is a product that in the event of you being unable to work due to illness or accident, the insurer will pay you a replacement income. The benefit is payable until you recover and are able to work again, or if you don’t recover, it is payable until you reach your retirement age.

You also get full tax relief at your highest rate of income tax on the premiums you pay, which helps to make this cover more affordable.

If you would like to find out more about how we can help you continue your lifestyle in the case of an illness or accident, please give us a call.

Pensions

People in general are living longer today, and also the state pension scheme is creaking at the seams. The impact of this is that we will all need much more money ourselves to see us through our later years. As a result, retirement planning is usually an important part of our financial planning meetings.

Some clients want a life of luxury in retirement! Others are happy with the prospect of not having to worry about money, being able to go holidays each year and maybe change the car every few years. While these might not sound like big aspirations, they all take planning. Many people today are retired for 30 years and more and as they are not earning they are just living off their savings.

The government wants us all saving for our retirement, and so they allow generous tax breaks to help us along the way. When using formal pension plans, you get the following tax breaks:

- Tax relief on the contributions that you make
- Your pension fund grows free of any taxes
- You can take a portion of your pension fund out tax-free at retirement.

But just availing of the tax benefits is not enough. We help you to identify the right pension structure for you based on your specific circumstances and ultimately find the right products and investment portfolio to suit your circumstances.

If you would like to find out more about how we help you to achieve your retirement objectives, please give us a call.

Savings

When possible, we all like to squirrel some money away each month for a rainy day. Whether this is to achieve the comfort of an “emergency fund” or maybe your children’s education costs, the challenge is the same. Keeping the discipline of saving first each month and spending what’s left, and not the other way around!

But saving today is not easy. The financial world is a very uncertain place. The economic environment changes all of the time, the financial markets can be very volatile and people are very unsure where to save their hard earned cash.

This is where First Rate Financial Planning can help you.

We can advise you in relation to the range of deposit options and other potentially attractive savings options available to you. We help you to identify your savings goals, your timeframes and the right level of savings to help you achieve your goals. We will then find the best savings product in the market to meet your needs.

While doing this, we identify how much risk you want to take with your savings along the way because our aim is to ensure that you can sleep easy, knowing that your money is secure and gaining the best rate of return available to you.

If you would like to find out more about building up your savings, please give us a call.

Investments

Our clients approach us with a wide range of investment objectives. Some are:

- Investing money that is currently on deposit and earning no interest
- Looking for help in building an investment portfolio
- Looking to ensure their investments mirror their appetite for taking risk (or not)

Maybe your goals are a few of the above! It’s our job to help you identify what your investment goals are, and when you want the money to be available to you. We will then develop a plan for you and recommend the best way for you to achieve these goals. If you need an investment product, we’ll help you set that up too.

That’s only the start though! We know that your circumstances will change and your goals might change as a result. We also know that you may not be in a position to implement all the recommended solutions today. That’s where the value of our review process comes in. We update your financial situation, take note of any changed factors and tweak any solutions that are in place to keep you on course to achieving your objectives.

We make sure that any products you have are performing as you need them to. If they are not, we’ll recommend changes needed. At the end of the day, we’re in your corner to ensure your investment goals are achieved.

If you would like to find out more about how we can get your money working harder for you, please give us a call.