Financial health check

Learn to keep your finances on track

If you’ve got a car, you are probably used to ensuring that it gets a yearly check-up, whether that be routine servicing or the annual MOT for older cars. Why do we do this? Well, for a start the MOT for cars over 3 years old is a legal requirement, but aside from that, fundamentally we perform routine servicing and maintenance to ensure that we keep our vehicles running well, protecting them from unnecessary wear and tear, and to prolong the life of all the moving parts.

Now, ask yourself this question – When did you last give yourself a financial MOT?

We won’t lie – we spent some considerable time coming up with a few different versions of MOT for this article – Money On Track, Must Organise Those (pensions), Maximise Our Time, Making Opportunities Together to name a few, but fundamentally it’s the concept what matters. It’s a concept that is thankfully gaining more exposure and support is out there for us all to be better equipped going in to our mid and later life stages.

But just “what is the mid-life MOT” we hear you say?

The concept of the mid-life MOT is to encourage more people in their 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s to take stock of their health, work and financial situation together, making more active decisions across all of them with the aim of ensuring a better future and the desired retirement lifestyle. Taking this kind of MOT gets you thinking about some key questions such as:

Is my employment sustainable or do I need to keep upskilling as a plan B?

Am I making healthy choices in life to maintain or improve my health and mental wellbeing?

Do I save enough to have a comfortable retirement?

It’s aimed not only at individuals, but employers too, who are beginning to take a more active role in the health and wellbeing of their employees. As a nation we are living longer, and retirement is not always a single event taken at the same time as your state pension.

At MyRetirement, we speak with many people who are increasingly driven towards retirement goals which are phased in earlier, and not necessarily triggering full retirement. Planning ahead of time can help to create a certain amount of confidence in your ability to meet your goals, which in turn has a positive effect on the decisions you will make with work, your family, and your lifestyle, thereby making a hugely positive impact on your mental wellbeing.

To find out more about the mid-life MOT you could visit the free guide from the UK government here The midlife MOT: take control of your future now – Your Pension

If you want to find out how looking at your lifestyle when planning your financial future, and what that means for you specifically, then our retirement experts would be delighted to have a conversation with you about how we can help. The first meeting is with our compliments, so please get in touch today.

In the meantime, we’ve also produced a handy calculator which can help you take a look at what your current pension provision is and we’d recommend that you also gain an understanding of what your state pension entitlement is by visiting the UK Government pension forecast tool.