How to Live Your Best Life and Save the Planet

Lifestyle Financial Planning

Lifestyle Financial Planning is designed to enable you to live your best life. We work with clients to help them articulate what their ideal lifestyle might look like and we then design a financial planning strategy to help them achieve and maintain their ideal lifestyle.

At its heart, a financial planning strategy is designed to help you answer a fundamental question – can we do everything we want to do without running out of money? This will usually include an assessment of your existing assets, putting together a cashflow forecast and designing a strategy to manage your wealth and, if necessary, address any shortfall.

Spending time with clients discussing their ideal lifestyle is a hugely rewarding part of my job. In my experience, prospective clients often reach out because they want help with their pensions or investments and this is causing them a degree of anxiety. It is great when we can take that stress away and enable clients to focus on the positive aspects of what their pensions and investments can do for them. This is when the fun starts and clients can start dreaming of the round-the-world travel experience, the holiday home that the whole family can enjoy or the complete refurbishment of the house.

Typically, the financial planning strategies we design will be for the long term; for example, it may involve planning for a retirement several years away that could then last 30 to 40 years. It may also involve transitioning wealth to the next generation both during your lifetime and after your death.

Planning a wonderful future for you and your family can be exciting, rewarding and provide you with enormous peace of mind. However, there is a fundamental issue that more and more people are beginning to consider – will our ideal lifestyle be possible in a world afflicted by climate change and social inequality?  

Threats to our Ideal Lifestyle

We only have to look back throughout 2022 to see the devastating impact of climate change with heat waves, forest fires, floods and droughts affecting millions of people globally. At COP 27 the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres said that, “we are on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator.”

If we carry on as we are then we run the risk of negatively impacting our ideal lifestyle in retirement. What will the world look like by the time you are in your seventies or eighties? More importantly, what legacy will you be leaving future generations? Even if we have managed to live our ideal lifestyle, can we be sure that future generations can live their best lives?

Positive Impact

It is clear to me that we need to transition to greener global economy which benefits the planet and everyone on it. Governments, corporations and individuals are recognising this with more and more people looking to not only factor in risk and return when making investment decisions but also impact. Individual investors want to avoid those sectors, industries and companies that cause harm to people and the planet and, instead, invest in sectors, industries and companies that create a positive impact. As we transition to a greener economy the investment opportunities will be enormous, from green start-ups designing new technology to tackle climate change to established companies adopting greener processes. More and more institutional investors including large pension funds and endowments are looking to divest away from companies causing harm to companies achieving a positive impact.

If we hope to live our ideal lifestyle, I believe that we need to take into account risk, return and impact when investing for the future. If we continue to invest as we have in the past, then we should expect a worsening of the global climate crisis.

Combining Lifestyle Financial Planning and Responsible Investing

At Mangu Wealth Management, we work with a few selected fund managers who are committed to maximising both impact and financial returns. We combine Lifestyle Financial Planning with Responsible Investment and help our clients align their wealth with their values. Our objective is always to have a positive impact on our client’s lives as well as a positive impact on people and the planet.

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