The 5 Steps to Financial Freedom
Plan your future with confidence
Everyone’s personal financial situation is different. But there are simple, proven steps you can take to grow enough wealth to help you realise your life goals. At Upstream, our advisers explore them with you, give you the tools to take action and navigate you past the road bumps along the way. The personal road map we create for you is easy to
follow, detailed and built on five important steps…
Step 1. Discovering
Ideally, how would you like to live your life right now? What would you love to do in the future? After you’ve achieved your lifetime ambitions, what legacy do you want to leave behind? These are the sort of questions we’ll ask you. It changes from person to person, but we’ll go through your priorities, values, feelings about risk, family dynamics etc. The first aim is to get to the heart of what you really want for you and the people you care about. The ultimate goal is that one day you can look back on your life without saying, ‘I wish I’d done that’.
Step 2. Goal-setting
Living life on your own terms starts with setting absolute, clearly defined goals. Whether it’s for you or your family, we embrace our mission to guide your way in defining, quantifying, and prioritising your goals, for now, next week, next year and a decade down the line. That relaxed retirement, education fund, or plan to climb Kilimanjaro won’t happen unless you give your finances the chance to grow. Putting detail to your goals and what is actually needed to achieve them gives you tremendous freedom and motivates you in your day-to-day life.
Step 3. Planning
So, with your help, we’ve built up an accurate picture of your current life and future aspirations. Now, we work on your personal Lifestyle Plan, which will lay out the range of financial probabilities of achieving your desired goals. This becomes the backbone of your personalised Investment Policy Statement (IPS). It’s a clear guide that acts as a touchstone for making disciplined, systematic decisions about your investments, and sustains you if market conditions become turbulent.
Step 4. Doing
In the plan, each resource has a specific purpose and a distinct investment strategy. You’ll always know what you own and why. With your Lifestyle Plan, Investment Policy Statement and metrics to hand, portfolio construction, funding strategies, and any other components you may need are easy to set in motion.
We often use Vanguard and other like-minded investment firms to structure the underlying investments used in building portfolios for our recommended investment strategy.
Step 5. Managing
‘Events, dear boy, events.’ So said British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan when asked what he feared most. Life gets in the way of your best-laid plans, so your Lifestyle Plan will need to adapt. As your life evolves, we review and refine your plan with you. During the first few years especially, you can expect as a minimum, quarterly benchmarks and reports, and regular face-to-face reviews. We’ll stand beside you, offering expert support when you need it, managing your financial progress, adjusting the route to protect you when conditions are unfavourable, and encouraging you to step on the gas when the weather’s set fair.
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