How Year-End Money Advice Has Changed With COVID-19 – GOBankingRates
Money / Financial Planning
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The winter holidays bring the often-dreaded but all-important end-of-year financial planning that no one wants to do but has to anyway. Taking inventory of the year that just passed and strategizing for the one that’s coming up the pipe has never been easy — and the pandemic has turned the entire process on its head.
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From savings and estates to taxes and investing, every aspect of December financial planning has changed since 2019 — and so has the money advice that financial pros hand out to their clients, families and friends.
To find out how COVID-19 has altered the guidance that people get from the pros they trust, GOBankingRates asked the experts themselves.
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Financial Planning Became Financial Disaster Planning
A lot of pre-2020 EOY financial planning compartmentalized things such as health insurance and emergency funds as separate discussions. The virus forced financial planners to unify all of the elements under one master plan.
Matthew Roberts, chief operating officer at My Choice, now asks his clients to look at money as just one piece of a much larger puzzle.
“Before, it was just about building an emergency fund,” Roberts said. “However, I now advise my clients, especially families, to have a financial disaster plan to prepare financially for tough times like the pandemic. A financial disaster plan helps families quickly recover financially once a disaster hits. The plan includes a review of the client’s insurance policies, from health and life insurance to home and other property insurances, quarantine planning and assessments of whether or not their emergency funds will suffice for upcoming months.”
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Financial Pros Realized They Needed To Rethink Their Perspectives
Olivia Tan, a Florida-based personal finance coach and the co-founder of CocoFax, also endorses the financial disaster plan concept. That’s because the pandemic forced her to make a philosophical shift toward applying a business-planning mindset to personal finance.
“As a financial planner, I’ve been rethinking my typical money advice,” she said. “In corporate America, the collective experiences of natural disasters, terrorist attacks, office shootings and cyberattacks are all incorporated into a contingent business continuity plan known as a ‘business disaster recovery plan,’ or variant thereof.
“These plans lay out protocols and procedures that are initiated in …….