What a year! We still have a few weeks to go before we say farewell (or good riddance!) to 2020, and usher in what we all hope will be a far more positive 2021.
But I’m in a reflective mood today. You see, it’s the 5th birthday for Financial Care Solutions!
If 2020 has taught me anything, it’s that the pandemic has had a profound impact on everyone. Not a single one of my clients has come through the past 9 months entirely unscathed.
The pandemic has had a significant impact on businesses, personal finances, and our physical and mental health. Nobody could have predicted, at the start of 2020, that we would live through such extraordinary times.
Planning for the unexpected is incredibly challenging to do. But plan, we must! As a Financial Planner, I’m a huge advocate of not only having a plan, but also for having a backup plan.
The boxer Mike Tyson famously said that everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. 2020 feels a lot like a repeated series of punches in the mouth, resulting in even the most robust plans falling back onto Plan B (or C, D or E!)
You can never be entirely prepared for the unexpected. You can calmly make adjustments to your main plan when you have confidence in a range of possible alternatives. This need to occasionally make adjustments, in the face of dramatic events or changes outside of our control, is why we consider a range of scenarios when constructing financial plans for our clients.
When I established Financial Care Solutions five years’ ago, I was probably a little naive to think that my business plan would run entirely smoothly. But it’s healthy to evolve and adapt. If anything, my business has improved as the plan has been forced to change, with 2020 another example of how we are all so resilient in the face of challenges. My expertise and experience in the fields of later life planning and retirement planning have become increasingly relevant this year, with so much focus on our elderly and most vulnerable members of society.
I’ve no doubt that, as I embark on the sixth year of the business, and as we collectively head into 2021, planning for our elderly relatives will stay front of mind.
More positive vaccine news this week suggests that care home residents and staff will be first in line to receive the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, and we can all keep our fingers crossed that some normality will quickly return to our relationships with elderly loved ones.
Thank you for your support this year, and indeed during the past five years. Celebrating a business birthday feels a little strange against the backdrop of so many struggles for so many people, but we need to keep some normality in mind as we go about our lives.
