Do these four things before you invest a penny

Most people come to me wanting to talk about investing. Nine times out of ten, that is not where we start.

There is an order to this and it is not really a matter of opinion. Each step protects the one after it. Skip one and the whole thing wobbles the first time life goes wrong.

One. Clear anything expensive.

If you are carrying a credit card at twenty per cent while putting money into a fund hoping for eight, you are going backwards and paying for the privilege. Clearing that debt is a guaranteed return at the card's rate, which is better than anything I could put in front of you. Anything much above fifteen per cent goes first. A mortgage or car finance at a sensible rate is a different conversation.

Two. Three months of spending, in cash, that you can reach today.

Not three months of income. Three months of what you actually spend, which is usually a smaller number and an easier target. This money is not an investment and it is not meant to grow. It is there so that a redundancy, a visa problem or a broken air conditioning unit does not force you to sell your investments at the worst possible moment. Living abroad I would lean towards more than three months rather than fewer, because losing a job can mean leaving the country at short notice.

Three. Cover whoever the household cannot afford to lose.

If someone depends on your income, work out what happens to them if it stops. Life cover is cheap when you are young and healthy, and it gets more expensive every year you put it off. Critical illness cover matters more than people expect, because surviving something serious and being unable to work is the scenario that does the real financial damage. Check what your employer actually provides rather than what you assume, and remember it usually disappears the day you leave.

Four. Write the will.

Especially if you live somewhere other than where you were born. Without one, the rules of the country your assets sit in decide who gets what, and those rules are often not what you would have chosen. This is the step everybody agrees with and almost nobody does.

Then invest.

Once those four are in place, what is left over each month is genuinely investable, and you can put it to work without needing it back at short notice. That is the entire point of the order. Investing is not the hard part. Leaving it alone for ten years is the hard part, and the four steps above are what make that possible.

If you want to see where you stand against this, the free plan works it out from your own numbers in about five minutes. It will tell you which of the four you have done and what is still open.