At the end of the Women’s Wealth Workshop—hosted by last week—I had the opportunity to have conversations with several of the attendees. Many of the questions concerned financial planning, estate planning and investing.
While I will address the other concepts in upcoming articles; this article will focus on what makes a good financial plan. First of all, I like to explain the financial planning process as this: a detailed guide that, coupled with discipline, will help you reach your financial objectives. The plan needs to address concepts such as values, goals, interests and relationships as well as asset allocation and savings objectives. Therefore, a good financial plan is one that begins with your personal values.
Once you have a clear picture of what those values are, you can optimize your plan to suit your needs. The plan needs to allow for frequent revisions so that you will be able to update your plan as your life changes.
Find out what's happening in Mercer Islandfor free with the latest updates from Patch.
If you are still in the process of eliminating your debt or you are just getting started tracking your burn rate, you can still begin the planning process. While you can certainly manage your own plan, the question is, will you? If you are a do-it-yourself type of person, and have tremendous discipline, by all means, you might do well creating your own plan. Just remember, a financial plan includes not only retirement projections and investment recommendations, there are other matters-such as: insurance planning, education planning, tax planning, burn-rate planning, coordinating with other advisors, reallocating and charitable gift planning-to consider.
However, if you feel as if you are already too busy to optimizeyour financial life, you may want to consider hiring a professional-either a financial advisor or a financial coach. A good coach will push you and assist you in reaching your goals-sometimes more than you might push yourself.