17 October 2022
When it comes to debt, the more we owe, the more we will feel the pinch of higher interest rates, and we need strategies to deal with this healthily and constructively. Avoiding creditors and extending debt to service debt just puts us in an even more precarious position.
So – the first strategy for handling higher interest rates is to pay off as much debt as possible. The larger the debt, the harder it is to see a way out, and working with a financial adviser can help you navigate out and find your way to a debt-free reality.
We can also help you find better-suited financial products that will help you grow and protect your wealth, by reducing fees, and costs and mitigating the chance of over- or under-insuring your risk.
Tracking your finances is also a helpful way to handle higher interest rates. It’s easy to see a budget or spending plan as the equivalent of wearing a financial straitjacket. But tracking your finances provides another way to find opportunities to cut expenses and increase savings.
Depending on your portfolio's complexity, we can also look at different ways to diversify and restructure your investments and assets to bring better balance into covering today’s costs whilst still providing for tomorrow’s. If your portfolio has not been updated or amended in the last 18 months, there could be several ways to ease the pressure of higher interest rates.
Alternative investment opportunities are being developed all the time, helping us restructure longer-term investment goals into shorter-term opportunities to provide more income now and avoid simply cashing it all in at once.
Ultimately, we always need to keep an eye on our long-term goals – another way in which working with a financial adviser can help us stay focused. Economies go into recession, and they eventually get out again. It’s important to work together to handle the higher interest rates to find the optimal balance of your financial resources during lean times.