Let’s begin by addressing the elephant in the room. What is financial planning? It isn’t saving money, or investing money, or buying gold or stocks. It is bigger. Financial planning is a process in which you plan your personal finances to be able to achieve your life’s financial goals through disciplined saving, investing, and decision making.
Why do you need Financial Planning
While you might be comfortable in the short term, you need to have a long-term strategy to meet life’s key financial goals. These include marriage, child education, holidays, and retirement. If you still need a push, this is what a life of failed financial planning looks like.
Online Financial Planning
Online Financial Planning means making your investment and saving strategy using an online platform. Given the potential scale and volatility of a solid financial plan, online financial planning and investing is the key to keep things simple, clear, and actionable. Not only you avoid the tedious paperwork and visits to financial institutions, you get best advice, a plethora of tools, and information at your fingertips to empower you to make informed decisions.
Benefits of Online Financial Planning
Goal-wise planning: The investment instruments and patterns vary depending on the time and amount required for your goals. For instance, investing for child’s education is very different than building your retirement corpus. Online Financial Planning gives you razor-sharp investment strategies for building corpus for your set goal.
Periodic Monitoring: A good Online Financial Planning dashboard gives you a consolidated and real-time view of your investments and their performance. You get to monitor your funds’ performance even at intraday level. All you need is a computer or your smartphone with internet connection.
Online Tools: To plan your investment strategy, you get a plethora of tools with your Online Financial Planning platform. Goal calculator, retirement calculator, risk meter, SIP calculator, tax calculator and return calculator are some of these tools. They make the whole process very methodical and data-driven. These tools and calculators are probably the most salient feature of online financial planning. You must try one.
Security and Safety: This is of paramount importance when your life’s savings are involved. Any Online Financial Planning platform worth its salt will have multiple security layers to protect your money, passwords, and personal information. Unlike offline forms of investing, most of your information is for your eyes only. These platforms also regularly keep testing and upgrading their security infrastructure.
How to get started
Identify a good online financial planning product. If you aren’t sure of your own research, you can always ask your friends who’ve been investing through one of these. Make sure you have an evaluation criteria. For instance, lowest brokerage or personal advise or age of the institution whose product you are buying. Once you’ve identified the platform, understand their features and sign up or take a demo on their website. If you have any pointed questions at this stage, feel free to drop them in comments. I hope you understand the importance of online financial planning and will take the effort to recalibrate your saving and investment efforts accordingly.