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To Your Wealth/Michael P. Haubrich,
CFP January, 2005 Resolve to Spend
Time Planning |
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There's nothing like spending time in the desert to
clear the mind and allow uninterrupted time for thinking and planning. This holiday season, my wife and I
sojourned to our desert retreat and spent some quality time establishing our
financial, family and professional goals for 2005. At a time notorious for making resolutions, the New
Year affords the opportunity to remind individuals that goal setting and
planning should take place at least annually.
However, I contend that planning, reviewing and renewing goals should
not be limited to a once a year event.
The only true way to ensure that early resolve lasts the next 12
months is to revisit your objectives and modify your tactics as an on-going
process. We love the simple beauty of the desert and are always
humbled by its expanse. We find it an
ideal venue for reviewing our past year and doing a "quality check"
on how well or not so well we accomplished what we set out to do. After reflecting on the past, we spend the
majority of the time focused on the future and on revealing and thoroughly
discussing our coming plans to minute detail.
We always start at a strategic level: what are the
primary personal, family, financial, and professional objectives for the
coming year. We ensure that our goals
are achievable, specific and results driven.
We take turns, often stopping to explore and validate objectives that
are consistent with our overall life plans.
And we sometimes discard objectives that are inconsistent with our
long-range plan. In short, we always keep our eye on the big picture while we
decide which pieces we're going to fit into the complex puzzle of life this
year. We determine our personal saving, spending, gifting
and investing plan; we identify major expenditures such as home improvements
or transportation needs that are expected to occur during the year; we
concentrate on ensuring that our professional objectives allow for work/life
balance; we discuss what we want for ourselves, for our children, for our
grandchildren and for our extended families.
Once we've established the highest level
objectives, we get down to the business of how we're going to
realize each. This is the
tactical action plan and it supports not only the strategic objectives of the
current year but also serves to reinforce, validate and support our long
range plan. Many hours are spent
dissecting actions that will or will not yield the most positive progress
toward a goal. Tactical elements of our plan include such
considerations as specific actions, timelines, and resource
requirements. We even try to determine
how we're going to measure our success during our next desert dialogue. We identify specific metrics that will
allow us to quantify and demonstrate our success and/or our progress. Recognizing that plans often change due to
unforeseen or unexpected life events, we build in flexibility and alternative
tactics for accomplishing a given objective. We ask ourselves and each other
difficult questions, intended to challenge our thought processes and test our
true level of commitment to a given goal before we put them down in writing. Writing goals down is an important step in the
planning process. Without writing them
down, it's a great deal easier to focus solely on activities rather than
actions-which may or may not support yearly objectives or the long range life
plan. Once we write down our goals and the accompanying actions, we have
every intention of including them in our list of accomplishments for the next
year. To do that requires discipline,
flexibility, consistency, dedication and resolve. And to my thinking, that's what making New
Years resolutions are all about. Michael P. Haubrich, CFP
is President of Financial Service Group, Inc., a Registered Investment
Advisory Firm in |