Spoiler – lots of you have
Imagine you’re renovating your kitchen. You’re in the moment, dreaming of the island, the worktop surfaces, the marble backsplash or if you’re like me, the gadgets. Looking forward to the parties you’ll have with your friends. The afternoons and evenings sitting around with your family talking and laughing.
Now, you’re talking to people helping you design and plan it. Then, I come along and say, “Would you like an £800 kettle? Or this even fancier one which is £1,300?”
The answer to that question is of course, a resounding “No.”
And yet, many of you have them. Some of you have made me a coffee using them.
But just one brand which sells them, arguably the market leader, has made over £100million turnover in just the UK. They are present in 16 different countries so there is obviously worldwide appeal. *
What I’m talking about is, of course, the Boiling Water Tap, and the brand I’m talking about specifically, is Quooker.
Now the penny has dropped. All it does is it produces Boiling Water instantly. “The tap that does it all” But if you step back, it does exactly what a kettle does – it produces boiling water. The only difference is you didn’t need to wait 3 minutes for it.
In a simple nutshell, that’s Marketing. They’ve taken an imaginative slant on something relatively boring, captured your imagination and made the sale.
So how can we use this in our own personal financial lives?
Spending versus Lifestyle
In recent years, I’ve just been getting by rather than living in style. We started the business three years ago with no clients, so of course it was going to take time before I could take more than a basic income. But coupled with that is the fact I have three children in childcare. And for anyone who has been living under a rock, childcare is expensive!
By the time our mortgage and childcare bills are paid, we’re close to £3,500 of monthly outgoings (£4,000 on a 5 week month) with all your usual bills and life to add on top of that. I’m not complaining – we love our house and the fact we can both do our jobs too.
But something some of you will have heard me say is I want to put some “style” back into our “lifestyle.” (I wholeheartedly accept that this is an extremely cheesy phrase.)
We want to focus on enjoying our lives as a family. We’re thinking about what we want our life to look like. Dreaming of holidays or caravans or a meal out or a night away.
We work to live, we don’t live to work.
This is something which I spend at least some part of pretty much every meeting with clients and potential clients discussing. What do you want your lifestyle to look like? And I want to walk the walk as much as talk the talk.
Reframing the Conversation
While you probably started talking to myself or John in a bid to save tax, or to try to make your money work harder, or didn’t think your investments were doing anything or to start thinking about stopping work, hopefully you would agree the conversation hasn’t remained on this. It’s become what do you want to do both now and in the future?
And then we’ll figure out the best way to hopefully make it happen.
Now, if I had originally said to you, “here’s an expenditure questionnaire spreadsheet, please complete it for now and in retirement.” Would you complete it? Of course not.
If I asked you about your budget, do you have one? Do you look at it and stick to it? The answer is, Probably not.
But that’s exactly what we’re doing in financial planning. We’re trying to make the most of what you have both now and in your future. And together we regularly review where you’ve come from and plan for your future.
If you’re saving for your future, you aren’t doing it at the expense of doing something you really want to do now.
You’re being intentional about saving now to give you more opportunities in the future. You’re developing good habits. But you’re still enjoying the holidays, the experiences and the gadgets which make life fulfilling now. You might drive the nice car, have the nice house and the fancy clothes, but that isn’t all you have.
The Value is in the Planning, not the Plan
The value of working with us should be both in getting you to do something (ie. Save and invest) but also that you have the trust and confidence that what you are doing maximises your life. You can enjoy what you have now knowing that you’ll be able to enjoy your future too.
It’s like with overpaying a mortgage. Would you rather overpay your mortgage now to get it paid off, or would you rather simply know that you have the money that you could pay it off if you needed to?
Or saving into a pension. I’m 33 (for another couple of months anyway) retirement is still a long way away. Piling money into a pension for 20+ years’ time still doesn’t exactly fill me with excitement. But if it’s reframed as “this small action today and each month from now is going to grow into something much bigger, which gives me options to stop working on my own terms and live the life I want in 20+ years. Oh, it will save me some tax now too” – now I’m listening.
On face value, nobody wants an £800 Kettle. But they want the benefit that the instant hot water gives them in time saved, hassle removed and more options to fill it!
And that’s exactly what financial planning should do for you too.
Get in touch with us if you want to start your planning now.
*https://www.kandbnews.co.uk/news/quooker-uk-outlines-2023-plans/