What’s Your Financial Needs Profile?

Answer 9 Questions to Find Out

Financial planning is a daunting task. My first recommendation is always to speak to a licensed financial planner to create a plan that is designed for your specific goals.

However, if you want to do a bit of self-discovery before you meet a financial planner, try out this 360-NeedsProfiler from 360F, our partner in this collaboration.

What is the 360-Needs Profiler

As its name suggests, this online tool aims to predict your financial needs and risk in terms of insurance protection and wealth accumulation. Unlike the usual protection needs calculator that simply shows you how much coverage you should have, the 360-NeedsProfiler highlights needs that are most relevant to you. Their relevance is shown as a percentage relative to others. If you have budget constraints (who doesn’t?), knowing which needs are most relevant to you will help with your choices.

360-NeedsProfiler generates your final profile with 9 non-intrusive and simple online questions. You can track your results right from your first answer, as the profiler returns a preliminary result which it then refines continuously as you progress with your next answer, and the next, and so on.

Such a process creates insights for you as you can now identify the factor that drastically changes your needs profile. A key part of the profiler is 360F’s proprietary prediction algorithms that analyses your answers in the context of historical Malaysian demographic and mortality data.

We know that algorithms are a bit of a black box, but suffice to say the profiler follow certain truths:

• Women tend to have a higher need for critical illness than men due to them living longer and experiencing a poorer quality of life in old age
• The greater the number of years your dependants rely on you financially, the higher is the relevance of life protection
• The higher your income net of expenses, the greater your ability to set set aside sufficient funds for your family's protection, whist your needs for wealth accumulation becomes more relevant.

Before partnering 360F to roll-out this tool for Malaysians, we had to try it out for ourselves of course.

The First Guinea Pig - Me

So I’m 54 years old, the breadwinner of the family, with 4 dependents (non-working wife and 3 teenage children, with university ahead of them). And I wanted to live out a comfortable stress-free lifestyle in retirement (not the bare minimum, nor the hedonistic maximum).

These were my scores:

Life protection needs: 54%

Critical illness needs: 59%

Disability needs: 44%

Wealth accumulation: 94%

It’s clear that at my age, all protection products like life insurance, critical illness and disability protection are still relevant to me. But the 360F-NeedsProfiler has assigned the highest 94% relevance figure to my wealth accumulation needs, obtainable through investments.

I believe this is because I still have children who are still dependent on me for the next few years, and because I desire a comfortable retirement. So after making sure I get my base insurance protection sorted out, I should focus on building my nest egg to support my children’s education and to fund a stress-free retirement.

Have a Go!

Have a try for yourself. Let me know if you agree with your results or if you have questions on the 360NeedsProfiler at [email protected]. And do contact me too if you find yourself with some protection needs and need some help with the insurance side of things.