This website aims to help you in both the planning and execution of Money Management over your lifetime.

Most financial advice concentrates on execution in the moment. How much cash to keep? Which funds to invest in? How does an ISA work? And you will get good advice for today. But what about tomorrow? And why is it good advice for you?

We will show you the rules of the game, but make no secret of our belief that it is the personal balancing of wants and needs that is most important. We will help you to do that.

Everyone is different

This site is for everybody. But we all have different knowledge and abilities. We are young or old, rich or poor, with partner or without, with children or without, with good prospects or without. The only certainty for the future is that we will get older.

We also all have different wants, needs and personal circumstances.

We also - let’s be blunt - have different capabilities.

Money Management is enormously personal. It is about the intersection of your wants and needs with your income. Both now and in the future.

There is not a formula to make these decisions for you.

This makes it hard because:

• Every spending decision has consequences for the future.

• If you spend it today you have immediate gratification. You have something you want, now.

• If you spend it today you can’t spend it tomorrow.

• If you spend it tomorrow you will have slightly more to spend than when you spend it today, and maybe you’ll have a slightly better idea on how or where to spend it. You have deferred gratification. This is ‘Saving’.

• The ‘right’ answer is personal to you. You can’t plug your financial situation into an app and let it spit out the ‘right’ answer. And if you’re in a relationship it’s not just ‘you’ that matters, it’s ‘us’. Do you want it today or do you need it more tomorrow?

• Spending decisions are frequent. You are spending every day. Every day, for every item of expenditure, you might ask: Should I do this? Or should I defer it? Or should I stop it?

Money Management is……

………handling the interaction of these four things. -

1. Money-in – earnings, gifts, savings income, investment income, borrowing

2. Money-out – spending, tax, gifts, interest on debt, debt repayment, insurance premiums

3. Your wants and needs…..

4. .….both now and in the future

It’s the uncertain future that makes it difficult.

Deciding whether to buy something today may not always be easy. But at least it is reasonably straightforward so long as you ignore the future. Have you got money in the bank? Will you have enough left to buy the other things you need? Think, discuss, act.

But you have another option. Which is to put the money aside for tomorrow’s wants and needs. And ‘tomorrow’ could mean next month, or next year, or any period. This adds a whole new dimension of complexity to the spending decision.

To cope, you need a Process.