Seeking financial planner to help us tidy up our finance mess

ReliablePorcupine

Hi everyone, first time posting, please be gentle.

Partner and I are looking for someone to sit down and take us through our finances, are we making the best use of what we have, can we be smarter about certain things, that sort of thing.

• I am self employed and also have a fixed term income that comes to an end in the summer. I am debt free for the first time in my freelance career. I do my own self assessments. When I have worked with business accountants previously, they have been very helpful in knowing how to get more out of tax returns but it has been frustrating when I have questions about my returns they can't answer.
• My partner is full time employed and the main breadwinner.
• We own our house outright. We would be interested in exploring options of a bigger place for our growing family either by selling what we have or remorgating for a deposit and renting out the existing property.
• We plan to emigrate in the next 4-5 years and want to have something saved for that
• We have some medium term saving goals such as a new vehicle, again, for the expanding family.

When we go looking for help and advice, it seems to fall into two categories: Those that will invest your money and sell you life insurance products or small business advisors that aren't set up for personal finances. Perhaps we're asking too much of one person, but we'd rather like some help with a number of things.

In no particular order of priorty, we would like help with:

Short term:

Self employed advice - but actual advice, not someone just doing it all for me.

Household budgeting

Best place to put cash assets

Medium term:

Family financial planning

Property and mortgate advice

Medium term saving goals

Saving pot for emigration

Long(er) term:

Pensions and long term investments

Does anyone have any recommendations of planners/advisors/ personal accountants that can step into our messy finances and help us clear things up? Or suggest the keywords to put into google to find someone that can.

Thanks in advance!

jimjames

Maybe MSE forums, you'd get suggestions and it's then down to you to decide which bits are relevant. From experience the savings and investments board might get better responses than this one as it has some very knowledgeable regular contributors.

At a first glance your plans look a good place to start as you've really mapped out the areas you want to look at and are in a fairly good position if you already own your home. If you have kids and aren't married then looking into the implications of that on finances and future should definitely be a priority. 

grumpy_codger

Emigrating in 4-5 years and buying a new house now? To me personally this makes little sense. Expensive and too much hassle.

With regard to budgeting and savings you can get a good and free advice here. For investing 5 years is a too short term.

Yorkie1

Just on your suggestion about letting out your current place, I would advise against this. Not just because you have plans to emigrate in a relatively short time frame, but because it is not for the faint-hearted. The legislation is complex, and current legislation going through Parliament is leading to some current landlords to decide that they want to get out of the business.

ReliablePorcupine

Thanks for all the responses so far. It's just the critical voice we needed for some of our plans. We've chunked out some of the questions and will take the advice to come back to the forum with specific questions. Thank you!

Hoenir

Emigrating in 4-5 years? 

Then all your goals need to short term orientated. Medium term is 5-15 years. Long term 15 years plus.

pmduk

MSE's budget planner is a good place to start, you can see if you're solvent or not and it'll help to have everything in front of you, should you go for external advice, it'll  save the advisor some time.