Helping clients to save with our Budget Buddy Planner

If your clients are someone who loves to plan, this time of year can be a great opportunity to hit that reset button, especially when you may be talking to them about their current or future mortgage plans.

The last year saw some incredible changes in the savings space and your clients may be unsure about the rate changes, moving and reviewing their savings pots and how this may impact their future savings needs.

Whether they are saving for a deposit for a house, a dream wedding, a new car, the holiday of a lifetime, saving for the children, the grand-children or even just a rainy-day fund, they first need to understand their budget!

Our re-vamped budget buddy is a great tool, in an editable format to help people see their monthly finances easily. Firstly, they need to review how much money is coming in, whether that’s through a salary, savings, pension, rental yields etc. Then review essential expenditure and any personal expenditure that is planned each month. Once the document is completed, they total everything up at the end, and they will be able to see what they have left.

There are a few ways of saving that could work best for your clients, and it's all about understanding their budgets first. Using this tool alongside any affordability conversations could help them think more about saving or reinvesting and rental income.  

A penny a day challenge

Colleagues at MBS are trying out the viral ‘penny a day challenge’ and we’d love to extend that invite to our brokers and your clients too. The logic behind this is that you save 1p on day 1, then add a penny to the amount each day. This can take a few different approaches, some like to do it in reverse, so you aren’t putting the larger amounts away in the lead up to Christmas, some like to have all the amounts and choose at random how much to put away.

You can download a printable PDF here and tick the days off as you go in whichever order you choose!

If you’d prefer to do monthly totals, these work out as:

Or in reverse:

The right type of savings account is needed, to be able to deposit whenever the saver likes, this type of regular savings is generally suited to an instant savings account, that has no restrictions on when you can deposit.

We do recommend taking a look at our new budget buddy and encouraging clients to set some personal savings goals for 2024 and make their savings work harder for them. We have a range of savings products available on our website www.monbs.com