Many things can affect your financial life, but what I see in our industry is often a constant focus on money, wealth, and rates of return. While those things are important, many other aspects impact your financial life. These things are important to your life in general, but they often get missed, which can affect how your life actually plays out.
Over the next two months, we are going to look at each of these elements that can potentially have a positive or negative effect on your life. Each week we are going to focus on just a few items, improve upon them, and then move on. I’ve got a deck of cards in front of me that we are going to use to discuss these additional items that impact your life and your financial life.
Let’s begin with our first card shown below. When you first graduate from college or tech or you enter the workplace, your life looks like this: you are running through life. You’ve got all the energy in the world. You can work all the overtime, put in the extra hours, and get your life on track because of all the energy that you have.
Later on in life you might purchase a home, get married, have children, and you go from running to simply trying to walk through life.
Life often changes as we age both physically, and sometimes mentally, and we start slowing down. This is typically the later part of our life. We start to feel the aches and pains of our youth. Maybe our body becomes fragile. We just don’t have the energy that we once did, but we’re still moving along and enjoying our life.
Then there’s happenstance that can cause us to rely on others. The thing about the card below is that it can be played at any age in the game of life. This could happen in your 20s, 30s, or 40s. We always think that this is just an end-of-life conversation, but we have to be prepared for this card to happen at any time.
We also need to think about our estate after we die. Who do we want our money to go to? Have we lived the life that we dreamed of or will our life soon be forgotten?
This next card worries many of my clients: what happens along the way if there are lawsuits? What happens if someone decides that our money should be their money and they decide to play this card against us?
Finally, the card that I want you to continue to come back to as we go through this process over the next couple of months is below. It represents 3 different areas of our thinking. The small area is what I refer to as “the things you know you know”. The next largest one is “the things that you know you don’t know” and we will hopefully be addressing some of those things over the next few weeks. The largest part of this pie chart is “all the things you don’t know that you don’t know”.
I invite you to join me on this journey. Week-by-week we will go through around 25 different areas of your life and we hope that you learn something along the way. If you are learning something new, that means that someone else might also enjoy learning. So, please consider sharing these with someone that you care about so they can gain the same insights into these different aspects of your financial life.
