Life Moments

Buying a first home

• Deposit money belongs in savings, not investments. A market fall in the wrong month costs you the house, not a percentage.
• Budget beyond the deposit: legal fees, taxes, survey, moving and the furniture you did not think about.
• Get a decision in principle before you view. It makes your offer credible and tells you the real ceiling.
• Read the lending criteria before applying, not after a rejection.
• Do not open new credit while an application is live. It triggers a re-assessment every time.

A new child

• Check your death-in-service nomination at work. An out-of-date one is common and consequential.
• Make or update a will, and appoint guardians. This is the actual priority, ahead of any savings product.
• Increase the emergency fund. More people now depend on the same recovery.
• Start education saving if you can, but only after the buffer exists. Time matters more than amount here.
• Review income protection. A drop in income matters more once someone else relies on it.

Starting a business

• Separate the money on day one. Mixing personal and business finances is painful to unpick later and makes tax harder.
• Open a business account before you trade, not after the first invoice.
• Understand your cash cycle before you need a facility. The gap between paying suppliers and being paid is the thing to plan around.
• Keep a personal buffer separate from the business one. They are not interchangeable.
• Get the ownership and signatory structure right at the start; changing it later is administrative work.

Redundancy or a drop in income

Tell us early. The options available to someone who calls before they miss a payment are considerably better than the options afterwards, and asking does not harm your record.

1. 1Work out your essential monthly outgoings. Not your usual spending — the essential figure.
2. 2Cancel or pause what is not essential, starting with subscriptions.
3. 3Contact every lender you have, including us, before a payment is missed.
4. 4Check what cover you hold: income protection, redundancy cover, employer benefits.
5. 5Use the emergency fund. This is precisely the situation it exists for, and using it is not a failure.

Retirement, and losing someone

Approaching retirement

Increase the cash buffer to around a year, shift risk down gradually rather than all at once, and trace any old pensions before you need them.

In retirement

Sequence matters: drawing from investments during a fall does lasting damage. Holding a cash reserve to draw from instead is the standard defence.

A bereavement

Tell us once and we handle the accounts from there. You do not need to repeat it to different departments, and there is no rush on anything that can wait.

Acting for someone else

Power of attorney and similar arrangements must be registered with us before they can be used. Doing it early is far easier than doing it in a crisis.