Financial planning is one of those terms that always sounds a little bit nebulous. “Having a plan,” certainly sounds like a good idea, but what does it really mean when it comes to your finances?
The confusion makes sense mainly because…
A financial plan can be completely different depending on what advisor you are working with, or even what questions you ask the advisor to answer for you.
The nuance in the process makes it difficult to describe succinctly. But in the interest of clearing up the confusion, let’s walk through what you might expect from a typical financial plan while working with the Craftwork Capital team.
It starts with understanding where you are today.
Before we can begin to plan for tomorrow, we need to understand where we are right now. Sometimes this step alone is daunting. But similar to the way a doctor will check a bunch of basic metrics in an annual physical, we as advisors have some core data we need to understand in order to put all of the pieces together.
Next, we decide where you’d like to go.
Some of the people we work with come to us with really detailed and thoughtfully crafted goals. Others just want to know if they’ll be ok and financially secure in the future. Whether you have put a lot of time into defining your financial goals or not, we can help with this part of the process.
What if…?
Once we have a framework built, then we can explore. We often find this to be the most meaningful part of the process in our work.
Some questions will be filled with hope, like “If I can manage to save $X, would it let me retire earlier?” Or, “Can we stay on track if we buy a beach house?” Others will be more somber, but critical like “Will my spouse be ok, even if my pension isn’t around for them?”
We will explore the possibilities and show them to you side by side to understand them.
For the record.
By the end of the process, you’ll have two pieces of output from us. One will be a report that shows our projections and the scenarios that you wanted to explore. This will be filled with benchmarks that will let you look back to see if you’re on track well after we complete the process. The other will a summary of anything we recommend you adjust or keep an eye on in particular to stay the course or improve your trajectory.
More importantly, what you should walk away with is confidence. Confidence that you know where you stand. That you can make decisions from an informed perspective instead of just guessing and hoping.
If that sounds like a process that would help you, we’d encourage you to set up a consultation today. While this outline is the process for many planning cases, the nuance can only really be understood when we are talking with you about your personal situation.
We look forward to a chance to bring this process to life for you!
