Understand Your Plan Will Not Come True

Prefer to listen rather than read? Pair this post with Deliberate Money Moves Podcast: Understand Your Plan Will Not Come True.

Think back to your time in school. Where did you think your life was headed? Has that come true? Now think back just five years and again, where did you think your life was headed? Has that come true?

My guess is that your life is not turning out exactly as you had predicted. No judgement here on whether it’s better or worse. I’m not even interested in that. I’m simply saying it’s different. The same is true of your financial plans.

Your Financial Plan is Always Changing

We can never know everything about your finances for the rest of your life. No one can accurately predict what your gas bill will be 20 years from now. We can only make the best guesses we can and use that information to make the best decisions we can today. That’s what financial planning is all about.

We look out at all the things that affect us and try to understand the things we can and recognize we will never understand the things we can’t.

For example, there is no way to know what tax rates will be when you retire. So, we build a plan that is flexible and has leeway in terms of how we fund what you want to do and when you want to do it.

Use these Four Guiding Points

1. We build a plan that works under the reasonable and conservative assumptions that we make along the way.
2. We build a plan that suggests where we might be in the future.
3. We never rely blindly on the plan we built to make future decisions.
4. We update the plan every chance we get, understanding that even after it’s updated today, it will need to be updated again tomorrow.

Here’s this week’s Best Financial Life tip of the week: Understand Your Plan Will Not Come True.