About WiserAdvisor University
WiserAdvisor University is designed to provide you with
high-quality information about investing and finance straight
from those who know best: financial professionals.
The University includes hundreds of informative articles on
dozens of topics of interest to individual investors like you.
If you find an article informative and would like to be contacted
by a financial advisor, we encourage you to fill out our simple form.
The WiserAdvisor service is free, objective, accurate, and confidential,
and will match you to qualified financial advisors who can help you reach your investment goals.
About WiserAdvisor.com
WiserAdvisor.com is an independent and unbiased matching service designed to help individuals find the best financial advisors for their unique needs.
This easy-to-use system prides itself on its simplicity and accuracy. After you fill out a simple form, our algorithms search through the thousands of advisors in our system and provide you with up to three advisors who are best able to help you accomplish your goals.
|
|
|
|
Other Articles
|
|
|
|
|
Saving
Dollars and Sense
By Lynn Evans
President, Northeastern Financial Consultants, Inc.
Yeah, I know. Tackling your financial mess this soon after the holidays is as delightful as anticipating your annual flu shot: you know you should have one but you’d rather not right now, thank you.
So let’s deal with your excessive spending and the guilt, which is bound to follow.
You are not a bad person. But you may be a typical over-spending American. There, now that that confession is out of the way, let’s figure out a way to deal with it.
I’m going to take a position that very few financial folks consider: You’re not thinking big enough. I’m not talking about more debt or a bigger house or anything financially “bigger”. I’m talking about goals.
Consider this. If saving money, as opposed to spending it recklessly, is driven by a screaming nag in your brain’s morality center, then it will never work. Never.
If you can’t create something more exciting and compelling than saving for the sake of saving (or God forbid, for a rainy day), then other more tempting diversions will argue strenuously for spending your cash now. So how do you create something more compelling?
I would offer this. If you were told that you had a very short time to live and knew that money was no object, what would you do differently with your life? To those who may be reading this and that scenario is a little too close to home, I apologize for what may seem my irreverence. It is intended to be a wake-up call.
If your life seems very routine and prescribed, then consider what would make you want look to a future very different from the one you are destined to have. Like what you would do with your time when you retire. Or where you would live. Or what courses you would take in college. Or to where you would travel.
And with whom would you do these things.
If you can visualize a life very rich with people you want to be around, places you want to visit, a house or two where you’ve always wanted to live, and a full schedule of challenging, spiritual, and gratifying activities, then maybe you’ll want to save some money to accomplish those things. If the picture looks as mundane or average as the life you may be living now, then no one in his or her right mind would want to save anything to perpetuate that!
If we take a page from the book by George Kinder, whose Institute for Life Planning, in California (where else?!), espouses developing a “life that is complete, that is richly yours”, then we should start planning for, and even living a part of, that life now. If you can imagine that to be so, then saving becomes so much easier and far more purposeful, and may even give you the incentive to forego spending that extra $300 on a new barbecue grill when your old one would do.
How would you discover what that life would look like? Going back to the question I asked earlier (if you had one year to live…), here are a few questions to get you started.
What dreams would be left unfulfilled?
What do I wish I had finished or had been?
What do I wish I had done?
What did I miss?
Once you’ve honestly answered those questions, you have some idea of what things are important to you and what financial goals you can create. For example, if you answered the first one with something along the lines of owning a business, then you could look at what is missing in your life that would prevent you from taking the opportunity to do just that. Is it money to open the business? Is it the skills you feel you are lacking to run a business? Is it that you don’t know what kind of business you would own? Exploring this deeper will help you come up with some scenarios to explore. Then instead of leaving that on the shelf to be one more dream unfulfilled you can set a goal this year of getting some information on how to determine what you need to start a business. Contact the Small Business Development Council (www.pasbdc.org) for your area and speak to one of the fine people at any one of our local Councils. They have plenty of material that help you find out what skills you need to have a successful business, all the way up to, how to finance your business. Although this may not appear to be a personal financial planning goal, it is! And it will be a fun thing to do.
Whatever your answers were to those questions, start now in formulating concrete plans to make them happen. Your first and normal reaction to this quest is most likely reviewing all the reasons why you can’t. That’s normal, and not to be dismissed out of hand. It’s the normal human resistance to change that is clogging up the wires in your brain. What the heart wants, the head is trying to reason away. It’s foolish, it will never happen, my spouse will never agree, there is no money to do this and there never will be, etc, etc, etc. But many times, it’s putting it down on paper and looking for solutions that makes the brain’s interference go away.
Like identifying exactly what it is that stops you from having the life you really want. When you feel that resistance, ask yourself these questions to get at the heart of it:
What’s standing between me and what I want?
What’s my plan for overcoming each of these obstacles?
What do I have, in terms of personal strengths and outside resources, which will help me deal with these obstacles?
What skills and knowledge do I need to add to accomplish this change?
Are there other people I can call on for help in overcoming these obstacles?
What’s my time line for overcoming these obstacles?
How can I make these changes happen sooner?
Do I need my family’s support for making this change?
If so, how can I rally that support?
How can I evaluate and monitor my progress toward my goals?
Never mind figuring out where you spent every penny last year and vow not to have the super latte every weekend. You now have financial goals worth getting up for! And goals that will easily make you want to have the money to realize them. Now you can go to any website or use the old fashioned calculator to figure out what you need and when. Filling in the blanks is easy once you know what you want at the other end and, more importantly, why. Any good financial planner worth their salt can help you, too. Good luck!
Click here to submit request>
Go Back to Topic Page>
If you are an advisor and would like to see your articles published, click here
Article reprinted by permission. Unauthorized reproduction of content prohibited.
|
|
|
|
