Geoff Gaggs Offers 9 Key Financial Planning Items | Mission Wealth Management

make a financial plan for this new year if it’s not if not it’s never too late joining us now is jeff gags from mission wealth management to help with a 2006 financial wellness plan so you’re not just sticking cash into the mattress that’s right that’s right it’s important jeff we’re glad to have you here let’s go ahead and go down our our nine key items on your checklist starting right off with credit reports you have to know where you are in terms of your own credit it’s real important to check your credit reports and scores the reason being there’s a study that over 80 percent of reports are inaccurate you need to take the time to make sure that that is indeed correct it impacts being able to buy a home buy a car um it could even impact being able to get a job so it’s important that it’s up to date and then to brace yourself you should have some sort of emergency reserve yeah you want to have a little bit of cash on hand in case the unexpected comes up and you don’t have to go into debt so typically three to six months worth of expenses is nice to have on hand three or six months salary is another way to

look at it too well really it’s the expenses expenses are the key and then you got to think about your liabilities yeah there’s good debt and bad debt good debt is when you have a home mortgage the interest rate is deductible and the asset appreciates typically over time bad debt is something like a credit card where the interest rate is typically pretty high and it’s non-deductible and that can catch you then as we look at our fourth item it’s spending where are you at when it comes to the end of the month and what has gone out of your pocket yeah this is where you need some discipline and it’s important just to track and have a goal of what your spending is because by doing that that ties into point number five which is saving and allows you to save take control of your own destiny and for 401k plans which are popular with a lot of companies the savings rate has now increased for 2006.

it’s now 15 000 for the year and if you’re age 50 or over it’s an additional 5 000. and yeah and important all this we’ve seen statistics showing that saving in america has gone down family putting money away just happening as much anymore savings rate is almost zero it’s important to start saving wow we also need an investment review you need to take a look look at all the investments make sure they’re competitive make sure your asset allocation is diversified and you know what what do you what is your allocation between real estate stocks fixed income and typically as you get older you shift from more growthy stock investments to more conservative fixed income like investments to preserve what you have and you do a little pruning too such as wilting some of those stocks that are no longer going to bloom for you doing a little bit of rebalancing is important also you stress that an insurance review can be extremely helpful to review all the insurance because as you get older your needs change and so you should make sure that number one it’s competitive number two the terms of the insurance

makes sense and that you have the right policies in place and then some people may say i don’t need to do this now but estate planning can be vital a lot of folks put this off but it’s important there’s three key items that most adults need and that’s an advanced health care directive a will and a durable power of attorney for finances and a lot of folks especially in santa barbara would benefit from a trust and then our final line of number nine taxes why pay more when you can pay less yeah and you could talk about this forever but one key item would be to look at the potential refund you’re receiving and if you’re receiving a large refund it could make sense to lower your withholding rate so that every month you’ll actually receive more income and there’ll be less money given to the government earlier on it’s basically loaning the money government why do that that’s an easy solution but when you start to get the intricacies as well i mean it could be everything from avoiding paying that capital gains to being smart about an upcoming real estate sale when you’re talking about taxes yeah it’s important to see the

accountant especially at this time this is tax time to uh to do your own homework or see your accountant to make sure it’s all in order and i think that now that we’ve looked at all nine items you know it’s always said don’t start stumbling into debt in the first place we’re still in an era where a lot of people just load up on credit card debt debt and all other shapes and forms is that not still an issue with you at uc i see it all the time and you can have folks making a lot of money and they’re just not disciplined and they’re not saving and we’ve got to take control of our own future and the way to do that is by having some discipline and doing some savings okay well if you need help with your control your discipline and your savings go ahead and give jeff a call at mission wealth management perhaps he can inspire you to tighten up your ship when it comes to your finances really appreciate your having the time here to talk to us about these issues and come again well that does it for this edition of the coastal business report we air every sunday morning at 8 on keyt and again wednesday and friday

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