Fear of change and Financial Planning

After spending the past 16 years working in the world of retail financial services, I’ve become used to fairly constant change.

We experience a great deal of change to the regulatory environment, pension rules and even what we call ourselves; I started my career as a ‘consultant’ before becoming an ‘independent financial adviser’, and these days I go by the title ‘financial planner’.

A lot of people find change rather disconcerting.

New research from TSB has found that one in five British homeowners find change ‘scary’ and over a third say they associate change with ‘uncertainty’.

The research was conducted in partnership with Richard Wiseman, Professor of Public Understanding at the University of Hertfordshire.

It looked at two types of change; change that is imposed on individuals, and change that is brought about by individuals themselves.

The research found that around a third of homeowners are comfortable with change that is imposed on them, as long as they ‘know exactly how it will affect me’.

Over a quarter of people told researchers they ‘feel nervous’ if they don’t know how a change is going to affect them.

Over a third of people said that they initially feel nervous about change that they brought about themselves, but usually feel happy afterwards, with a quarter welcoming change, saying ‘it’s good to refresh every once in a while’.

How we feel when faced with change could influence our Financial Planning decisions.

One benefit of constructing and following a comprehensive Financial Plan is a better understanding of how change will affect you.

This can help to reduce nerves around changes to your life, safe in the knowledge those changes will be affordable and part of a longer-term strategy towards what you really want to achieve.

If you’re facing a change and worried about the uncertainty it could cause in your life, what better way to deal with that uncertainty than to work with a Financial Planner.