What Kind of Financial Shape are you in?
Right up until my mid 20s, I was quite active, staying in shape was easy. However, my overall health left a lot to be desired. I wasn’t flexible and my body was always achy and sore. I also didn’t eat very well, and I would exercise off any bad consumption decisions.
What I had always done was no longer good enough to be able to perform well mentally or to feel good physically.
I consulted with a personal trainer who dug deep. We looked my physical health including flexibility, endurance and strength, my eating habits and my goals and objectives. We also looked at my current level of physical activity.
With the knowledge from that discovery, we started to explore strategies to improve my health. This included eating differently and exercising differently.
I started doing yoga and attending fitness bootcamps. I also started working with a chiropractor an acupuncturist and other health professionals as needed.
Did I start with a chiropractic adjustment? No
Did I start with an acupuncture treatment? No
Did I start with health supplements or prescriptions to manage inflammation or pain? Hard No.
I started with Discovery and by working with an unbiased health coach that had no products to sell. He walked through that process with me.
The result of this discovery and analysis was health confidence. To this day, if I temporarily get out of my routine and good habits, I know what to do to get back to feeling good.
The process to having financial confidence is very similar.
The financial and business knowledge you have inherited and learned has led you to where you are. Perhaps a good financial life and a very successful business or career.
But maybe you have ambitions to do something you haven’t done before, something your family hasn’t done before.
You may want to transition your small business into a family business. Or perhaps you would like to transition from running your business to mentoring your successors. Perhaps you have attained your financial independence and would like to transition to charitable work.
Do you start with tax strategy? No
Do you start with a nice big tax-exempt permanent life insurance policy? No
Do you start with a family trust or well diversified portfolio that invests in sexy assets classes like private infrastructure debt and farm land? No
Those are tools and some may be important at the implementation phase. But if you start with tools, the tools you end up with may not be the right ones for where you are going.
So where do you start???
In a word. Discovery.
Go deep into who you are, where you want to be and why you want to be there. Understand where you are currently. Then, start to map a plan and implement strategies.
It can be helpful to work with a trusted advisor who can guide you through this process and help you co-create the right plan. A trusted advisor may also walk beside you in implementing the right strategies and in making sure that the tax, legal and financial advisors implementing strategies are working together and in pursuit of your objectives. A trusted advisor could be a CPA, a lawyer or a financial professional. There are also Family Enterprise Advisors and Trust and Estate Practitioners and other professionals that can act as your trusted advisor.
It is important to understand how your advisors are compensated. If they have products to sell, that may limit the amount of time they are willing and able to allocate to focusing on your objectives. There are “fee-only” or “advice-only” financial planners that do not sell financial products. Rather than representing a financial institution, they choose to work for their clients directly.
As in most things, the right fit is important, so always talk with at least two or three advisors before committing to an engagement.
Experience Financial – Coaching & Consulting Inc. is an Advice-Only Financial Planning business working with families and family businesses on estate, succession and transition planning. No AI was accessed, utilized or harmed in the writing or editing of this article.