Planning for today and the future
There is a tendency to focus on the immediate consequences of
actions and to give inadequate consideration to the longer term
consequences. All too often, people will:
- buy new house;
- buy investment properties;
- set up superannuation funds;
- borrow money;
- lend money;
- secure assets to financial institutions;
- give guarantees;
- get into business dealings;
- setup family trusts and companies; structure arrangements such
as directors, shareholders, beneficiaries or controllers of such
entities,
and only consider the immediate day-to-day or short term
consequences of doing so. But what are the longer term
implications? Once actions have taken place, making changes
thereafter often can be more difficult. For example, getting
married is a very easy thing to do; but, what about getting a
divorce! It is like that with most things. It is
usually relatively easy to get into something but working with that
in the long term and exiting from it may be more complicated.
Of course, the biggest complication usually comes with
incapacity or death. If this is not well planned for, it can
present family members with all sorts of potential problems that
arise just at the wrong time. A situation that seems to be
ticking over satisfactorily now has all manner of complications and
problems that were not previously appreciated. There is an
emotional cost involved in a failure to plan adequately.
Family members are required to tackle these issues just at
the very time in their life when they are least able to deal with
them. Further, it also can become very expensive. It is
usually the case that whatever the planning costs may have been in
addressing the matters earlier, the consequences of failing to do
so results in many multiples of the cost in trying to fix the
problems. And this is if they can be fixed at all.