Personal finance companies
The credit crunch and its attendant problems for UK consumers are focusing people’s attention as never before (well not since the early nineties anyway) on getting their finances sorted, and we’ve had a raft of enquiries as to whether there are personal finance companies that can actually help you get your finances back in order. It kind of follows on from my recent post about personal financial advisers and whether you do, or don’t really need one. My personal take on IFAs is that, given the research you can do the job yourself … to a certain degree, though for mortgages you’re always going to want to talk to an adviser as the deals change daily. But ‘personal finance companies’? This perhaps exemplifies part of the problem we have in the UK now with our finances. IFAs will help you buy new products, but as for sorting out the spaghetti of your own budgeting - nobody can do it but you.
The good news is that you don’t need anyone else. There is so much information out there now. As well as walletwatcher we’d give an honourable mention to sites such as fool.co.uk, thisismoney.co.uk and moneysavingexpert.com. There is very good personal finance software, which I’ll be covering in more depth in a post later this week, and there are superb online news pages from the Financial Times, the Telegraph and myriad others. The main things to do are as simple as they always were - pay down debt, get organised, get a complete picture of your financial standing, cut out waste. In fact you could let your granny and grandad be your personal finance company, as it’s homespun wisdom they would have appreciated.
