10 Financial Planning Steps To Take To Cope With Redundancy

Have you ever thought about how you would cope if you were made redundant?

This blog puts a Financial Planning perspective upon a recent post on redundancy by Lawyer Coach.

For some legal professionals redundancy can come as a blessing and provides the opportunity for early retirement or a career change but for many the threat of restrictions to a lifestlye currently enjoyed and a period of belt tightening can weigh heavily on one’s mind. So what measures can lawyers take to reduce the impact of redundancy?

There are some Financial Planning steps that be taken pro-actively:

1. Review your expenditure. Is there anything that can be cut? Can you purge the ‘luxury’ expenses?
2. Set up an emergency fund
3. Investigate establishing an redundancy protection policy to help pay for your day to day expenses and school fees - if the terms or premiums don’t seem to be of value at least save the premium amount into your emergency fund.
4. Do you have debts that can be cleared sooner?
5. Is your CV up to date so you can beat the rush to new job offers?

At the point of redundancy you may wish to consider these Financial Plannings actions:

1. How are you going to use your redundancy payout? Clear debts? Invest it? Use it to cover expenditures until the new job starts?
2. If you are over 55 is your pension fund big enough to provide an income? This could be a short term measure or perhaps the time has come to consider full retirement?
3. Have you lost employee benefits that will need replacing? Life assurance and income protection for example.
4. Does redundancy offer the opportunity to re-evaluate your life and career direction? Is this the chance to do something that you have always wanted to do?
5. Seek professional Financial Planning help.

Is there anything I have missed?

If you would like to know more about how you can better plan for redundancy please do contact me.

Andrew Neligan is an award winning, fee based Chartered Financial Planning who assists legal professionals with their Financial Planning

More information can be found in my collegue, Martin Bamford’s redundancy guide.