Process
Planning Money for Life
While many people perceive that money is their most scarce resource, for many, if not most, the reality is that time (and specifically, lifetime) is most scarce. This disconnect between perception and reality results in people often managing their lives on behalf of their money, rather than managing their money on behalf of their lives, as it should be.
The heart of my advisory practice is devoted to helping my clients implement a superior model of both money and life management. Through mutual dialogue and attentive listening, I learn about the history of your life, the challenges and constraints that you have, and your hopes and life goals. This practice is formally known in the financial advisory field as life planning.
Just as a company has projects for which it requires finances, so an individual’s life has projects that require finances and planning. Many financial advisors, including the largest and most prestigious financial organizations, often counsel their clients without reference to the life projects that they propose to finance. In a relationship with me, however, you may expect to spend significant time talking about your life’s projects, and how you can best achieve a balanced and mature approach in your personal relationship with money.
My training in life planning and advisory was with George Kinder of the Kinder Institute, recognized as the founder and ongoing leader of the life planning movement. Many large investment houses run sentimental television commercials intended to convey that they have such practices. My personal experience with them is that they do not, and only a skilled and practiced advisor can provide such personal, confidential, and influential service.
Often, I find that my clients may not even initially be aware of their true feelings about money, their motivations, the nature of their interactions around money, or about what they want to get most out of life. Some may have sufficient resources to fulfill their goals but do not allow themselves to utilize those resources for various reasons; others may lack the resources to fulfill goals and dally in creating fulfillment plans and options. For most clients and prospective clients, therefore, our meetings are rich, rewarding, and revealing experiences from which they take away fresh thinking and new energy to live the lives they truly want and to engineer their finances to achieve that.