Want to Accomplish Something Important?
Three ways a financial plan can help you reach your goals…..
Some things in life are just too important to leave to chance such as: accumulating the funds necessary to finance a comfortable retirement, paying for your children's college education, providing lasting care for a child with special needs, leaving a legacy for your family, church, or charitable organization, and on it goes. These are all long-term financial obligations that can keep us awake at night worrying about how to accomplish such challenging endeavors. Combine that with the everyday demands of career, family, civic activities, and you have a bubbling caldron of commitments that can make your brain boil. How can your limited financial resources possibly cover such an expensive "to-do" list?
The answer is simple. You have to find a way to maximize the effectiveness of your financial resources over time. In other words, accomplish more with less. The answer is simple but unfortunately, not necessarily easy. In many cases the difficulty lies in our ability, or lack thereof, to conquer distraction and procrastination.
Distraction keeps us from seeing the big picture with clarity. It causes us to spend our valuable time and money on things in life that have little or no importance to what we would actually like to accomplish. Procrastination allows one of our most important assets, "time" to slip away unharnessed. It deceives us into believing there will always be enough time later to figure out what it is that we actually want to accomplish. Distraction and Procrastination combine to make it virtually impossible to decide which daily actions to prioritize as being most important. As a result, many of us go through life with only a vague idea of the things we would like to accomplish on a daily basis. Vague ideas create vague goals. Vague goals create weak results. For many of us that's just not good enough. We need a comprehensive process to help us bring the big picture into focus and keep it there. This is where a written financial plan can make a big difference in our lives.
Planning is the process of thinking comprehensively about a desired goal or outcome. The key is to establish our goals and then clarify our priorities. We must consistently focus our attention and financial resources on our highest priority items over time. It is important to do it now rather than later. A well-thought-out financial plan should be at the core of that process. A financial plan can help you in three important ways:
- Identify and prioritize your most important financial goals and objectives
- Decide on a comprehensive course of action that has the highest probability of success
- Create a written standard that you can use to measure your progress over time
Financial Planning is the process of living our lives by intelligent design rather than chaotic evolution. It orders our steps in a manner that maximizes the effectiveness of our financial resources over time. It can even help us sleep better at night by giving us the peace of mind that comes from knowing we have a plan in place to accomplish the things in life that are just too important to leave to chance.
If you would like to discuss the ways in which a financial plan can help you achieve your most important financial goals please contact us for a free consultation.
Keith Donnell is a Certified Financial Planner Professional with 25 years of experience helping people plan for major life events such as paying for college, providing for a child with special needs, retirement planning, retirement income planning, estate planning, and more. He can be reached at keith.donnell@modernwealthconcepts.com
Keith M. Donnell MBA, CFP®
Keith.donnell@modernwealthconcepts.com
Think, Plan, Execute!