Not so many years ago, it was far from unusual for people to join a company upon completing their education and stay with them until retirement. Nowadays, our lives and careers seem far less predictable, with many of us spending time with a dozen or more employers during our working lives. Consequently, a lot of men and women feel quite insecure about their finances and careers, and their personal lives too. Fortunately, it is still possible to make your life feel more secure by organising it in a way that makes it easier for you to deal with sudden periods of unemployment or shocks in your personal life. Join us as we discuss the best ways to live more securely in an insecure world.
Creating a Protective Barrier Against Misfortune
To live a secure life in an insecure world, you must create a barrier between yourself and the external risks that can be perceived. The first step is to identify these risks.
Identifying External Risks
External risks may be divided into 3 broad categories to simplify the process of identifying and mitigating them.
Financial Risks – A sudden loss of income and a fire resulting in the total destruction of a property are two financial risks that many of us face every day of our lives. As a consequence, home and income protection are frequent topics of discussion, which means advice is quite easy to find. There may, however, be other risks unique to your circumstances that you also need to identify.
Health Risks – There are health risks that everyone alive must face, and health risks that are specific to small subsets of humanity. Whatever health risks you face, make a note of them all.
Personal Risks – The relationships you enter into, the deals you make with friends, the hobbies you engage in: all these are examples of things that may represent risks in your personal life.
Having identified the risks you face and selected those you feel should be dealt with most urgently, we can move onto the final stage: risk mitigation.
Mitigating Risks
Some risks, such as the risk of losing your job, can be dealt with quite easily. Others, such as poor health, are more difficult to deal with. But no matter how daunting the risks you identify may at first appear, there will be steps you can take to mitigate them, such as those suggested below.
- Mitigating Financial Risks – Accumulating savings, acquiring new (marketable) skills and purchasing insurance are all effective financial risk mitigation strategies.
- Mitigating Health Risks – Exercising, eating well and learning how to relax are just a few examples of the many strategies you could adopt to mitigate risks to your health.
- Mitigating Personal Risks – To mitigate risks in your personal life, you should always do your homework before making important decisions.
It may not be possible to eliminate risk from your life completely, but you can significantly reduce the effects each risk has on your life by taking pre-emptive action.
