What is Your Money For?
Too often money is looked and considered for just what it is: money. A financial plan focuses on numbers, targets, returns, risk, etc., with a lot of hype placed on the latest and greatest investments, and returns on your money. After all, almost everyone wants their money to grow and they want to protect it, so let’s not discredit those aspects. Each are important and have their place in any financial plan – but they shouldn’t be the goal of a financial plan.
Can you verbalize why you want to build your wealth and protect it? Can you describe the ultimate purpose or goal for your finances? Why, exactly, do you focus on saving and growing your money?
A few weeks ago, we penned the article, How Do You Live Your Best Life? The goal was to help you think about your thinking and build clarity around your core values so they can sit firmly in the driver’s seat of your life. In other words, every time you make a decision, those values should stand as the foundation for that decision, certainly for every decision about money.
Unfortunately, we have seen too many people living for their money. In other words, they go along with a standardized practice of living as an American. Maybe this is keeping up with the Joneses. Maybe this is living so tight that they don’t enjoy the ride of life. Maybe this is just not knowing what they don’t know and asking the wrong neighbor for advice.
The truth is that your money is for your use. It is here to help you pursue your objectives in life. That purpose is different for everyone, but how your money relates to it should be the same. You should have a plan for this relationship and it should look like this:
1. Well-Defined Core Values
2. Written Statement of Financial Purpose
3. Purposeful Financial Plan
Where do you start?
The answer to this begins with the first thing on the list you don’t have.
Utilize the exercise in How Do You Live Your Best Life? if you need to work on defining your core values.
Use your core values to help you write crystalize the purpose for your money and ultimately write your Statement of Financial Purpose, which should begin with “Money’s purpose in my life (our lives) is to______.” And if you are still stuck, consider reading Unacceptable Regrets to help you drill down.
If you have both Well-Defined Core Values and a Statement of Financial Purpose in place and all you lack is a Purposeful Financial Plan, well, that is what we do best as a Life Planning Firm. We help people live Life on purpose by both building and helping implement Purposeful Financial Plans.
Life is too short to live it serving your money. So, don’t! Make a commitment that your money will be here to serve you and get your 3-step Life Plan in place today.