Mid forties couple, with Family looking for guidance

D

Dermob

New Member
Messages
3
Hi Folks, First time posting, I'm hoping to get some good advice.

Age:
43
Spouse’s/Partner's age:
43

Annual gross income from employment or profession:
E95,000
Annual gross income spouse:
E60,000

Monthly take home approx 8000

Type of employment:
Me Private
Spouse public

Expenditure pattern:
neutral, we have never overspent or over saved!

Household expenses of approx 1700per month excl mortgage,
Tansport expenses of 600 per month,
leisure expenses of 1300 per month (eating out/holidays/other, children & creche of approx 1300 per month.
generally dont finance a car, so every couple of years a car is saved for and purchased outright

Rough estimate of value of home
E515,000
Mortgage on home
E279,000
Mortgage provider:
BOI
Type of mortgage: Tracker, interest only, fixed rate
Fixed from 2022 for 5 years, approx 21 years left on Mortgage, monthly payments of 1380€,
3%

Other borrowings – car loans/personal loans etc
None

Do you pay off your full credit card balance each month?
Yes, rarely use credit cards

Savings and investments:
combined savings of €40,000.00
Saving 1200€ per month combined



Do you have a pension scheme?
Yes, I pay E395pm into personal pension, only started 2 years ago
Her company pay E250pm into a pension

Do you own any investment or other property?
No.

Ages of children:
4 & 7

Life insurance:
Yes.

What specific question do you have or what issues are of concern to you?

We have some cash to spare every month, but not really using it to do anything with.

We have 2 kids and would like to begin saving for their futures, we have some money circa 4.5k put away for them.

We dont mind living life but just cant seem to get a solid approach together for the future, we are not very good at savings and investments and looking for some guidance.
 
Last edited:
The first question would be, do you know where the €6620 (8k less mortgage repayment) per month is going if you only have "some cash to spare every month"? Until you know where it is going it's hard to provide any advice.
 
Ceist Beag said:
The first question would be, do you know where the €6620 (8k less mortgage repayment) per month is going if you only have "some cash to spare every month"? Until you know where it is going it's hard to provide any advice.
Click to expand...
Thanks Ceist,

Yes, Main post edited.
 
You seem to have a fairly good grasp of your income/expenditure so that's a good start. One of the best pieces of advice I got on here almost 20 years ago now was to create a spreadsheet to track all of this and set some goals. If your intention is to put your children through college then you have 11-12 years to save for the older child and you can set a target sum to aim for and work back from there to see what that means in terms of monthly saving. We did this and it meant we were always comfortable in what we were trying to do and could easily track if we were on target (usually reviewed it at the start of each year).
The most important thing with the spreadsheet is to keep reviewing it against your monthly accounts to make sure you are capturing all expenditure and income. Over time we have changed to using our credit card a lot more for payments as it provides a much easier way of tracking your spending.
There are plenty of posts on here with advice on where to put savings (lump sum or regular).
 
Dermob said:
Do you have a pension scheme?
Yes, I pay E395pm into personal pension, only started 2 years ago
Her company pay E250pm into a pension
Click to expand...
In my opinion, those contribution levels are way too low.

At your age, you could (and, in my opinion, should) be getting tax-relief at your marginal tax-rate on contributions of up to 25% of your gross salary.

Increasing your pension contributions should be your priority and you should maintain a high (perhaps even 100%) allocation to global equities for the time being.

If you have anything left over having maximised your tax-relieved pension contributions, then start paying down your mortgage ahead of schedule.

Building up a large cash balance is just bad planning at your age and stage in life.
 
The education expenditures will greatly vary according to where you live.
Your expenditure level is relatively high considering that at your children ages, a lot his covered once creche fees are paid. Are you current savings for a car? On the figures you gave, €1700 is not allocated. That's 20k a year, hardly spare cash I would think. Is it saved or actually spend somewhere you didn't factor in or on the cars... I don't know what your pension fund is like and what your employer contribution is like but your personal contributions are very low for your income and age.
 
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