What should you know?
A “Bag of Spanners” is a British term defined by the Urban Dictionary as:
“A product, device or service that appears to work, but when you look deeper turns out to be a collection of badly thought out and badly implemented ideas that is going to cause you no end of grief.”
Sadly, this is often true of the investments many people accumulate during their lives.
A random collection of products, stocks or funds, each of which had its reason at a specific point in time but collectively have no alignment or cohesion to long term goals.
Why should you care?
Without clear thought and intentional planning, it can be easy to accrue unnecessary complexity in your finances.
Internationally mobile families are especially susceptible to amassing a global smorgasbord of assets and the problem tends to grow larger and more convoluted, the longer you leave it.
This untidiness can come from many sources and is often not intentional. Examples can include legacy pensions, share awards paid by an employer that you’re not sure whether to sell or keep, stocks or products you once bought because it seemed like a good idea at the time or that a friend recommended but no longer fit with your needs, properties and accounts in countries you once lived, but are unlikely to again, the list goes on…
When it comes to managing your money, complexity is rarely advantageous. Leonardo da Vinci may have said it best …. “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
A well-crafted financial plan, linked to your individual lifetime needs and aspirations will bring order and clarity to your finances. It will unify all elements of your financial life and truly align your money with your life goals.
The randomness of the scattered colours shows just how difficult it is to consistently predict which countries will outperform from one year to the next. The chart also shows that a country that excels one year is frequently a low performer in the next, and vice versa.
