Financial Life Planning: Invested in You
Experience tells us that to achieve any long-term goal, you need to have a clear vision of success in order to maintain the discipline required to achieve big things. That’s true whether you’re trying to get in shape, grow a business, or master any difficult skill.
The same rule applies to financial goals, too. You cannot expect to stick to a plan if you don’t have a keen sense of what you’re aiming for, and more importantly, why you want it.
We all struggle to make sacrifices today for a better tomorrow. And getting a clear vision of what you want—and why you really want it—can be a lot tougher than it sounds.
In fact, most people can’t articulate exactly what they want from their lives—and, yes, even wealthy people reckon with this. It’s easy for all of us to get stuck in autopilot. We’re too busy living our lives to give issues like this the time and attention they require.
What’s more, achieving financial independence tends to come at the expense of other areas of our lives. When you’ve had your head down for a long time, working toward a specific something, you often look up and realize that some muscles have grown strong while others have atrophied.
Suppose you spent ten years doing bicep curls every day—with only one arm—and nothing else. The result would be an extremely strong arm attached to a lesser formed body in total imbalance. While extreme, this is not totally dissimilar from the position in which many of us find ourselves—and often we have no idea this is happening.
It’s easy to become disconnected from the “why” that catalyzed our goals in the first place. Often, once we achieve a goal, the fulfillment we had anticipated simply isn’t there. Perhaps we romanticized the goal over time, or we got our hopes set on something that reality could not deliver. Regardless, once we achieve a goal, we’re always left with that overwhelming question: now what?
At this point, you might think you’ve actually stumbled onto a therapist’s website, and not a financial advisor’s. Why should you be talking about hopes, dreams, and feelings with a bean counter? But we believe that there is no way we can create a plan that works for you until we know what works for you.
No two people’s lives are the same, so why would their financial plans be the same?
This approach is called Life Planning, and it helps you connect your financial life—all those account statements, asset allocations, and retirement projections—to your real life. We’ve always taken this view of wealth planning—for 30 years and counting. But we now have a scientific approach that leverages a suite of tools to help you identify what’s most important to you and what gives you the greatest sense of fulfillment. We’re passionate about this topic, and in time, we hope you will be too. It’s your life, after all! Let us help you make the most of it.
