What to Think About When You Start a Family

When you meet someone and settle down with them, the next logical step (perhaps after getting married, if that’s on the to-do list) is to start a family. There’s nothing more rewarding in life than watching your children grow up and become happy and healthy adults.

As you might expect, your priorities in life change somewhat, and you start thinking more about the future, including your family’s future. With that topic in mind, it’s worth considering making some preparations for your future, especially as what you do can affect your family.

Life Insurance

It doesn’t matter whether you’re an employee or self-employed. You should work out how your family will survive if you’re not around to support them financially. Life insurance is arguably the best way to secure a family’s financial future.

You can take out a single policy with a large payout or multiple policies with the same or different providers. However you do it, make sure the total payout is sufficient to cover your family’s outgoings until your kids become young adults and can support themselves.

Pre-Paid Funeral Plan

Let’s face it: no one likes talking about death. It’s not a cheerful subject and has obvious negative connotations. However, organising a pre-paid funeral plan is a positive thing you can do, and it means your family has one less thing to worry about when you’re not around.

You can customise various aspects of a funeral plan, but bear in mind there can be price differences between cremations and burials. That’s why it’s worth carefully considering your wishes and making an appropriate decision.

Where You Live

There’s no denying that growing families need large living spaces. If you’re going to have your first child, living in a studio apartment isn’t an ideal place to bring up a fast-growing baby!

When you decide to have a family, it makes sense to move into a house that gives you all plenty of space. You should also consider other factors, such as distance to the nearest nursery and primary school, for example.

Where You Work

Another point to consider is where you work. If your commute to work is long, it can be impractical when you’re trying to juggle your home life. Similarly, if you work from home, you may decide it’s better to work elsewhere if you can’t concentrate due to a noisy household!

It’s worth carefully considering where you want to work, if you want to drop down to part-time hours, and even what you’d like to do for a living.

Pension

Finally, a life insurance policy or two will undoubtedly take care of your family’s financial future when you’re gone. However, what about your financial future when you retire? As you can imagine, the state pension doesn’t really provide much money each month.

That’s why you need to supplement it with a private pension. It’s a good idea to organise a pension sooner rather than later. That’s because you’ll have to pay more money into your pension each month if you start in your 30s or 40s than if you had started in your 20s.

This post is in collaboration, however all opinions are my own.