One of the common misperceptions people have of me = ‘She is a Financial Planner, hence she is obsessed with money and making money’.
I won’t deny that I like making money and that I like building my personal Balance Sheet.
But there’s a larger picture to why I do this: It’s to help people visualize their future and set themselves up financially to accomplish it.
Money, and not having to worry about it, is a key tool to most of the other parts of our life that matter to us and that matter more than money, as they should.
But when my financial life is unclear, it can definitely affect everything from my ability to provide for myself and family to having a peace of mind about my future.
Peace of mind is so important: Not just peace of mind about the past (nothing any of us can do about that except continue to work on it) but also for my future.
If I can look towards my future with excitement or at least no anxiety or fear, well, that’s a really really good thing. And I can’t have that if my financial life is chaotic or messy or crushed under the weight of debt.
That’s really what Financial Planning is all about: Crafting a financial roadmap that facilitates our ability to look towards the future with hope and optimism. Picking the right assets is important too, but it’s a subset of the overall process of getting us there.
It also frees us up to focus on the things that really matter and to work towards those things that really inspire us to get up every day and greet each new day with hope and optimism.
It also is one less thing to taint our relationships; if we aren’t worrying about money, or fighting about money, or stressed about having different priorities than the other person, then we can focus on other things in our relationship that matter to us.
It frees us up to focus on the aspects of ourselves that we want to grow and improve upon or just simply take care of.