You don't have to figure everything out yourself
During the sandwich years, your finances can start to feel like a second job.
You might be balancing your mortgage and retirement plans with university costs, helping children onto the property ladder, supporting ageing parents and thinking about what you eventually want to pass on. Before long, there are pensions, ISAs, investments, tax allowances and family finances all competing for attention.
You can try to bring all of that together yourself. For some people, a spreadsheet, some online research and regular reviews may feel perfectly manageable.
But as life gets more complicated, the bigger question is: do you still want to?
1. A spreadsheet can tell you what you have. It can't always tell you what to do next.
Keeping track of savings, pensions, investments, property and spending is one thing. Working out how all those pieces interact is another.
Can you afford to retire earlier? How much could you safely give your children? What happens if you live longer than expected? Are you making the most of the tax allowances available to you?
This is where financial planning potentially adds value. It brings the different pieces together and helps you understand the impact one decision could have on another.
2. More decisions don't always bring more clarity
When you're making decisions yourself, there is no shortage of information. Market commentary, tax changes, investment ideas, calculators and financial headlines are everywhere.
The difficult part is working out what actually matters to you.
Having someone who understands your circumstances can help you step back from individual decisions and look at the bigger picture: what you're trying to achieve, what could knock you off course and where action might be worthwhile.
3. Knowing the numbers isn't the same as knowing how much is enough
This can become particularly important during the sandwich years.
You may know the value of your pension or how much you have invested. But does that tell you whether you can comfortably give £50,000 to a child for a house deposit? Or whether retiring two years earlier changes what you can afford later?
Planning can model different scenarios, rather than leaving you to make those decisions in isolation.
4. Doing it yourself also means making the difficult decisions yourself
Good financial decisions aren't purely mathematical.
Markets fall. Family circumstances change. Retirement approaches. An adult child needs help sooner than expected. At those moments, it can be difficult to separate what you feel you should do from what your long-term plan suggests.
Advice can provide another perspective when the answer isn't obvious.
5. Getting help doesn't have to mean handing everything over
This is probably an important point for this particular balancing act.
It doesn't necessarily have to be DIY everything or delegate everything.
You might simply want a professional sense-check at a particular point in your life. You might want help building the financial plan but remain closely involved in the decisions. Or you may decide you'd rather have ongoing advice and investment management.
The question is less “Can I do this myself?” and more “Where would getting help make my life easier or my decisions clearer?”
6. There is a cost to advice. But cost isn't the only part of the equation.
Professional advice and investment management come with fees, and those fees matter. Over long periods, relatively small differences in costs can compound.
But a fair comparison should also consider what you receive for the fee: financial planning, investment management, tax-efficient structuring, ongoing reviews and access to professional advice as circumstances change.
So the question isn't simply “How much does advice cost?”
It is also: “What am I paying for, and is that valuable to me?”
You don't have to figure everything out yourself
For many people, the sandwich years are exactly when finances become too interconnected to think about one decision at a time.
At Netwealth, we can bring your investments, future plans and family priorities into one financial plan, then model different scenarios so you can see what different choices could mean for you.
That might mean understanding whether retirement is on track. It could mean exploring how much you could afford to give your family without compromising your own future. Or simply getting everything out of the spreadsheet and seeing the bigger picture.
You may still make the decisions. You just don't have to work everything out on your own.
Could getting help make things clearer?
Speak to the Netwealth team about your finances and the choices you're weighing up.
If you'd like help making sense of where you are today and what your next step could be, we're here to help.
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When investing your capital is at risk. This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute personal financial advice. Netwealth offers advice restricted solely to our services. We do not consider the whole of the market, nor offer advice in relation to tax compliance, insurance products, or the transfer of defined benefit pensions.