Why is financial independence important?
Financial independence offers you the following:
● Teaches you new skills:
To gain financial independence, you must learn all types of new skills such as your work, filing taxes, learning to invest, and more. This can not only help you in times of crisis but also enrich other aspects of your life like your living condition.
● Gives you the freedom to live on your own terms:
Financial independence helps you live on your own terms by offering you financial freedom. You have countless doors open to you once you gain financial independence. You can travel, work, choose to move out, and afford to pay for a wedding, pay for further education, and more.
● Keeps you prepared for emergencies:
Relying on others for financial support always comes with risks. In case of a financial emergency, you might be left to your own devices. When you gain financial independence for yourself, you learn to prepare for these emergencies, and can even offer support to your loved ones who once supported you financially.
How can you achieve financial freedom?
While there is no single investment plan that will work for everybody, most people can achieve financial freedom through investing when they:
- Start by creating a list of wealth goals, specific goals they plan on achieving in the future (education, marriage, buying a home), the time frame they need to reach there, and how big is their appetite for risk is right now.
- Seek out investment vehicles that suit their financial goals and allocate a certain amount of funds they want to invest in each of them. These can include market instruments like mutual funds, individual stocks and bonds, and savings instruments like insurance and fixed deposits.
- Begin their investment process and ensure to keep their portfolio diverse and well equipped with high-quality instruments. Keep revisiting their investment often to see if anything needs any change or additional investment. Adjust the ratio of their investments as per their changing goals.
Investing for financial freedom
Investing is the key to generating wealth. Both fixed-income and market instruments have an essential role to play in the creation of wealth. While market-linked instruments have higher risks, they also have the potential to offer you better returns.
One essential habit of wise investors is balancing their portfolios. Offset the risk of market instruments with quality savings investments like life insurance. To put it differently, your loved ones can be assured of financial security in your absence with a life insurance policy, even if returns from your market instruments cannot be accessed.
Financial independence and retirement
Retirement planning is an essential aspect of achieving true financial freedom. Another key relationship between life insurance and financial independence has to do with insurance acting to create retirement savings.
Some Life insurance also offers you survival benefits in case you survive policy’s tenure. This sum assured is a suitable way to supplement retirement Income.
Takeaway: Your sample personal financial checklist for 2022
With your financial independence at your fingertips, all you need is a simple checklist to get you started.
● Investments:
Have a diverse portfolio of market and savings instruments that are keeping you on track toward your financial goals.
● Emergency fund:
Keep about 6–12 months of your living costs in a stable investment as an emergency fund.
● Life insurance:
Have comprehensive life insurance cover that can secure your family’s financial health in the event of your untimely demise.
● Medical insurance:
To be prepared for unforeseen health complications, have a sound health insurance plan that can help cover these costs for you.
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