At its heart, financial planning is about helping you achieve your goals. It is important to come up with specific, measurable, achievable, timed goals. By defining your goals, we can track your progress and ensure you get what you want from life.

Financial forecasting is a powerful way to show you a complete picture of your projected lifetime wealth. Using a series of assumptions, forecast models can be produced showing your future wealth given a number of different scenarios. This allows a skilled financial planner to put steps in place to ensure you can always live the lifestyle you want.

It is important to plan for the worst and work how you would cope in a ‘disaster scenario’. We model a number of different events and assess the impact these could have on your financial situation. These include situations where you die, are taken seriously ill or lose your job. We can also model external events such as a financial market crash. This can show the risks you may be exposed to and means we can take action to help minimise these risks or mitigate them altogether.

Before any financial plan can be fully instigated, it is imperative to be financially well organised. This means being on top of all paperwork and really understanding your complete financial position. Budgeting is about monitoring your income and outgoings and managing these to ensure your finances stay in a healthy state. An effective budget sits at the heart of every financial plan.

An emergency fund is a reserve of money that you can get immediate access to. It is usually important to have an emergency fund in case something unexpected happens. We help you monitor the emergency fund you require and ensure it is adequate at all times andavailable to you should you ever need it.

Life is full of risks but with careful planning, many of the financial risks you may face can be eliminated through insurance. This is crucial to ensure you can maintain your lifestyle and protect your family whatever the future may hold. Whether this is protection should you lose your job, become ill, die or any other financial risk, we can help you eliminate it.

Effective tax planning is all about legally minimising the tax you pay. This may be through tax-efficient investing, managing your capital gains tax position and thinking through how to manage any potential future inheritance tax liabilities.

An savings and investment plan involves assessing your investment risk tolerance, determining an optimal investment and saving strategy, deciding how much to invest and save and looking at the best products to invest as tax-efficiently as possible. A great savings and investment plan will provide a measurable target and be reviewed regularly to ensure you remain to track to achieve it.

Property often plays a central role in many people’s finances. Whether as a home owner, tenant or landlord, property can be pivotal to determining your lifestyle. It is important to create a long-term property plan to ensure you make the best decisions and achieve your aims. We can help plan your property needs including advice on mortgages and re-mortgaging, investing in buy-to-let or renting a room. Whatever your property planning needs, we will help you formulate a winning strategy to help you live the lifestyle you want.

Putting a plan in place for your retirement means thinking through when you may retire and what kind of lifestyle you want and how this can be funded. This may involve calculations of how much to invest in pensions or other savings vehicles, consolidating and managing your existing pension plans, state pension assessments and other strategies to help you live the life you want in retirement.

Most people have debts of some sort. This may include student loans, credit card debt, secured or unsecured loans or a mortgage. Debt can be a really useful tool to help you achieve your goals and structure your finances effectively. However, the management of debts is crucial to overall financial well-being and can be the undoing of some who let their debts get out of control. By regularly re-assessing your debts you will ensure you stay on top of your obligations and never pay more in interest than is absolutely necessary.

Effective estate planning can help you lower the inheritance tax payable on your estate when you die and ensure that your estate is passed on in the way you wish. This may including gifting, trust or pension planning to ensure your estate is in the most tax-advantaged position possible. A plan for your older age means thinking about how to fund your long term care, how to manage your inheritance tax liability and thinking about preparing and updating your will.

We know that family sits at the heart of what most people do. We work hard so our families can enjoy the fruits of our labour. At NorthStar we absolutely understand this. A large part of your planning will directly include your family. Some items, such as funding university or getting your children on the property ladder can be planned for. Other items are harder to foresee, such as financially supporting elderly parents if necessary. We will help you put the plans in place to support those that mean the most to you.