Growing Together: Grabbing Opportunities For A Better Future

“If you died tonight, your employers would advertise to fill your job role by the end of the month.
But your loved ones, chosen family friends, would miss you forever.
Don’t get too busy making a living that you forget to work on making a living.”
– Denzel Washington

There are a lot of things that employers can do for their staff. We regularly talk about how a well-rounded benefit program can help employees feel more appreciated and protected. However, regardless of how good those benefits are, if you’re an employee, at the end of the day, the responsibility of protecting your future self and your family lies with no else but you.

You can’t always rely on your employer; they can only do so much for you. And you have to realize that no matter how long you’ve stayed with a company or what you’ve done for them in the past, you are replaceable, just like every other employee, including the CEO. Never think that you’re more than just another number in the books for them. That’s not to say that you won’t be missed; it’s just that your absence likely won’t cripple the company enough to stop operating entirely. They’ll find someone else to take your place and move on. It’s just business, after all.

You’re now probably wondering what you can do to protect yourself, so allow us to present you with a realistic scenario:

Your employer decides to invite a financial advisor to give a talk about financial planning to everyone in the company. Attendance is mandatory and you’re forced to listen. You pick something up during the talk – something that you didn’t know before. What do you do?

There are three possible decisions that you can make, each with a corresponding outcome:

A.) You use what you’ve learned about financial planning and decide to act on it.

You choose to buy insurance, building your financial portfolio from the ground up. Insurance, as we usually say, is a good starting point for protecting your assets and ensuring you have a safety net from life’s unforeseen risks.

If not insurance, you perhaps settle on opening a mutual funds account as an investment. There’s a common misconception that you need a lot of money to become an investor. In reality, however, you actually don’t. For as low as P100 per transaction, you can already have an investment that’ll reap greater rewards in the future. All it really takes is some willingness, discipline, and consistency.

There’s also the chance that you’re a little confused by what you just learned, but you have an open-mind. You schedule a session with a professional to find objective answers to your questions. If this is the case, at least you’re still giving it a shot and are therefore on the right track.

All these actions yield the most ideal outcomes for your finances in the future. In case you didn’t already know, it’s never too early to shop for insurance and investments. The earlier you start, the better the outlook. You also sleep at night, knowing that you have something outside of your savings to fall back to in case of emergencies.

B.) You put off any sort of action for another day.

While you’re not entirely closing your doors yet, it’s not exactly ideal to wait and sleep on these sorts of decisions. You see, putting it off only increases the likelihood of you forgetting about it, which eventually results in you not doing anything at all.

Let’s face it, unless you’re a financial advisor, you’re probably not thinking about financial planning on a regular basis. All you might really be thinking about is working to earn your living. The only time you’ll be reminded about financial planning is when you hear about it from your colleagues or encounter a finance-related post on social media. In some cases, the time you realize that you need something, it’s already too late.

In choosing this decision, you are leaving your future to chance – chance that somehow or someway you’re one day reminded of what you’ve learned from the talk and decide to commit to it.

C.) You forget about what you learn and not do anything at all.

This is, of course, the least ideal decision. Financial planning can help you give your future self and your family a comfortable and secure life.

For instance, if you choose not to buy insurance and get sick tomorrow, can your savings cover all your medical expenses? If yes, do you think you’ll have enough left to feed your family, keep the lights running, and pay other bills? What if you contract a debilitating disease that prevents you from applying for insurance in the future?

If you fail to consider all these risks, you’re only setting yourself up for a difficult life in the future. Do you really want that for yourself and your family? Surely, you don’t.

Make no mistake about it, opportunities don’t come every day. So, when one comes knocking, take it. In the example we shared, it’s an opportunity to start taking control of your finances to secure your own and your family’s future. Again, you can’t rely on anyone to do this but yourself. That’s why your commitment to act today should not be to your employer, your company, or the benefits program; it should ultimately be to yourself.