Financial planning in times of uncertainty: A positive spin on a dark question

How is financial planning different during this time of heightened uncertainty brought on by the COVID pandemic and quarantine? The biggest difference is inside you: how you may be thinking differently about what you’re planning for. The financial planning process itself is the same and the principles of investing for the long-term are the same. What is different is how this situation has brought your priorities more into focus.

Dream as grandly as you can; reach for more than you think is possible. Pull the special parts of you up out of the mud, polish them off, and make them a part of your life again.

George Kinder

Is the quarantine making you rethink things?

If you’re like me, you’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about what you want to go back to. When you decide to slowly come out of quarantine, you have an opportunity to purposefully decide how to spend your time and money rather than fall back into the same old routines.

A helpful tool for thinking about this comes from a guy named George Kinder, who is known as the father of the Life Planning movement (a school of financial planning that fully incorporates your life goals and dreams within your financial plan). The current pandemic situation has made me pause several times and think about Kinder’s famous “questions.”

One dark question

One of the questions Kinder recommends you ask yourself, as part of developing a financial life plan, gets pretty dark. And it has been on my mind a lot over the past several weeks:

Imagine you visit your doctor who shocks you with the news that you have only one day left to live. Notice what feelings arise as you confront your very real mortality. Ask yourself: What did I miss? Who did I not get to be? What did I not get to do?

Not easy to think about. But maybe now is the just-right time to be asking yourself these questions. This is a moment when you are more awake to the fragility of life, yet you can approach this question from a positive point of view: You have managed to avoid the worst-case scenario (this time) so what do you want to be sure you don’t miss in the future?

Hopefully, as we inch our way back to some new sense of normal, you’re no longer overwhelmed with fear and you realize more acutely that you will not go on forever.

So, what do you want to do with your life? What is your money for?

Is retirement enough?

Yes, you still need to keep working and you need to keep saving and investing. But is the generic goal of retirement enough?

I’m very happy to build you a financial plan to show you exactly what to do to successfully make it to retirement and fund the 30 years that follow. But what about  painting a clearer picture of your vision — a dream or goal which might start at age 65 or age 45! Maybe it is retirement to a country cabin, or maybe it’s a career change, or a graduate degree, or opening a dog treat bakery.

(One thing I’m considering is pursuing the designation of Registered Life Planner. It’s a huge undertaking, expensive and emotionally taxing, evidently involving a lot of crying and catharsis as part of the training! But I dig it. I’m glad my practice is about more than just how to invest your money — though I definitely do that, too. And I’m excited about the idea of getting even better at helping clients build their life plans.

Even now, when I work with clients, I spend a large part of our Discovery Meeting using life planning techniques to help them dig deeper into their personal histories and articulate their values and goals. I want to take that further.)

True financial planning

When you work with a real financial planner, you are encouraged to bring your goals and dreams to the table. In comprehensive financial planning, we don’t just talk about investments. Investments are a tool we use, one lever we can pull, to make your financial plan successful — which is why you should continue your investment plan with optimism during this time.

We work together to take all your resources — work, skills, time, attitudes, savings rate, investments — and optimize them to help you reach your ultimate goal. That’s not to say there aren’t trade-offs to make and priorities to consider but the choices, ultimately, are yours.

Now is a unique time

Take this opportunity — and I’m giving this advice to myself, too — to think about what you really want. All the routines of our lives have been stripped away. You have a chance to add back only what you want and to fill your extra time with actions and decisions that will get you closer to your dreams.