When offering to review someone’s financial plan, I often hear the common objection, “No thanks. We’re all set.” Most of the time, they say they’re all set because they already have portfolios and savings habits that they’ve developed themselves or with another advisor. But that doesn’t mean their process for making decisions is set or strong. A portfolio isn’t a process. A plan isn’t a process either. Both are elements of the process. Our process aims to give you complete control over your decisions and the confidence to understand whether you’re making the right decisions in your personal and financial lives.
Research from the University of Scranton shows that only 8% of people feel they are achieving their goals. Every moment of every day, whether you realize it or not, you are deciding how to spend your time, what to pay attention to, where to direct your energy, and what to spend your money on.
How we make those decisions and how we behave reflects the values we live by, not the ones we aspire to. Understanding this is critically important if we want to live a life where our actions support our beliefs. As part of our process, we make sure to ask these important questions: What in your life matters to you, what should matter more, and what should matter less? Not answering these questions consistently puts our lives on autopilot. Adopting habits and a plan without giving them much thought puts you at risk of living in ways that are inconsistent with your goals and values.
Our lives are the sum of our experiences.
Our experiences are the sum of our choices.
Our choices are the sum of our values.
In other words, you are what you value. Closing the gap between the values we say we want and the values we actually have is ignored far too often in the financial planning process. This is why many people, no matter how much their net worth grows, still can’t seem to understand what’s missing in their lives. By analyzing our financial and life behavior, we gain self-awareness and clarity on who we really want to become. By routinely revisiting and tracing our decisions back to our values, we can create more meaningful, mature, and lasting definitions of success. Without knowing our true definition of success, our financial plans will not reflect our true priorities.
After analyzing your values and financial behavior, we get clear on the numbers. To move forward, we need to know where you currently stand, which means looking at investment statements, loan documents, insurance coverage, pay stubs, retirement plans, and more.
We link all your relevant financial accounts to our proprietary software, which integrates real-time data with our financial planning models. We conduct balance sheet, income, and cash flow analyses to get a sense of where your net worth is trending during this part of the process. We stress-test the current plan to identify how resilient your balance sheet is against various risk and liquidity scenarios. The analyses will then be accessible to you at any time through your personal client portal on our website and mobile app.
Once we have a clear understanding of the priority of your goals and have the necessary financial information, we work together to project what your financial picture will look like for the rest of your life. From there, we can see what goals need more attention, determine the strategies needed to reach them, and assess where we can reduce risk and, likewise, take on more risk. After deciding what strategies could improve the plan, we advise you on what habits and investments can help you execute your plan.
The most important part of the process lies in the execution and adaptation of the plan. Remember how 92% of people feel as though they’re not reaching their goals? You could have a great diet plan, business plan, or financial plan, but if the gap between what you hope to do and what you actually do is too great, you’re unlikely to see results.
We know following a new plan isn’t easy. Rarely do we find ourselves the ideal conditions to execute a plan, and even if those conditions exist for a moment, they may disappear before long. Sooner or later, we all face fluctuations in earnings and savings when life takes unexpected turns, volatility in the financial markets, changes in tax law, and rising personal stress and fears.
Whether your goal is to be more mindful of your budget, invest in an asset class that’s new to you, save more than you have in the past, or even spend your money when you’ve always been a saver, we know adopting new habits is an ongoing process. To avoid falling back into old habits or losing consistency, it’s critically important to have a process and professional team ensure problems are diagnosed and remedied to assure continual improvement. Together, we will ensure your plan continues to work for you and make changes when necessary.
Most people are more afraid of running out of money than of wasting their lives. For far too long, the financial services industry has enabled this dissonance by brokering transactions rather than focusing on helping clients make better, more purposeful decisions. The baseline for advisors and planners, at best, has been to simply know how much you’re making, saving, and investing and when your life milestones (buying a house, sending kids to college, retirement, etc.) will take place. Review meetings for these advisors tend to focus on walking you through your investment statements and not much else.
With our process, we help you understand your values, develop financial principles from your values, and make continual improvements in your decision-making so you can successfully execute your plan. Over time, you will gain clarity, confidence, and capability in your decision-making to make the most out of your life.
We believe our most successful clients are the ones that engage with us through holistic, comprehensive financial planning. Our most fulfilled clients don’t just ‘set it and forget it.’ They don’t put their lives on autopilot and choose to have a static financial plan. They consistently engage in the process, reflect on their decisions, and build stronger principles that guide their life. As they gain financial success and master being in control of their lives, our clients prove that the quest for financial excellence and personal realization need not be mutually exclusive.
When our clients become inspired, have new experiences, and just flat out feel more empowered to be their most authentic selves through the intentional design of their lives, their values evolve and mature.
They become less hesitant to dream bigger. They dare themselves to live a life that used to feel like a wild dream. They make their present better by making their future bigger.
This is when we know we fulfilled our mission. When our clients understand what they value most and have the confidence and tools to plan out how to reach their dreams, they create a life full of purpose and absent of regrets.
