If you’ve ever layed awake at night frantically trying to figure out your retirement trajectory or wealth roadmap, you know the pain that financial stress can cause. It is overwhelming, chaotic, and exhausting.
Something amazing happens when you decide to finally do something about it. You can tackle the financial stress. Sitting down with a wealth expert and investigating holistic financial planning to review your entire financial life can feel strange. You are met with a very odd combination of feelings.
Holistic wealth planning is like getting hugged by a grizzly bear. Let us explain.
The Dread. And Then the Comfort.
Ok, let’s talk about the bear for a second. Opening up your finances to a truly holistic wealth plan can be terrifying at first. When you open up that proverbial can of beans, you are forced to look the big furry monster in the face. You look at the beast in its entirety: your debt, your spending habits, your mortality (hello, estate planning), your tax picture, and everything that goes on in the unpredictable world market. Taking in the full scope of your financial situation can be scary. Sitting down with a financial professional to do this is willingly walking into the waiting arms of a thousand-pound beast (a grizzly unknown), but it confronts the cause of stressful sleep.
After this first step above, the arms of a hug come around you, and this is the warmth you need. This is the positive and negative of a bear hug.
And just like that you are secure in the plush arms of Mother Nature. When every asset, liability, fear, and hope are on the table, you suddenly feel safer than you ever have before. Nothing can sneak up behind you when your financial plan is a thousand pounds of pure love. All of your blind spots have been accounted for. The monstrous bear that is your financial life is not here to eat you up. It’s here to protect you and your family’s future with everything that it has.
Transfer Your Swimming in Thoughts to a “Cold Place”
Before you get this incredible hug of clarity, and bear your finances to someone, they usually exist as thoughts swimming around your head. They splash wildly about, unorganised and frenzied. One second you are concerned about capital gains tax, then you worry about your kid’s university account, then you wonder if you should be buying a rental property.
Trying to build your future around a million panicked thoughts bouncing around your own warm brain is just madness.
Which is where holistic wealth planning comes into play. It acts as an epic financial thought cannon. It blasts all of those precarious, swimming thoughts out of your head and into a cold place. A “cold place” is not Antarctica. I’m talking about a completely unemotional space where your finances are organised and displayed as a dashboard of cold, hard facts.
Here is what I mean by “cold place.”
- Undefined fears freeze into solid data
- “What ifs” become probability sliders
- Million dollar ideas turn into timelines
Say goodbye to frantic swimming.
Everything that was once a worried thought freezes into beautiful, crystalline clarity when placed in a cold environment.
Let a “Master Builder” do his Thang
You can’t build a house on a swamp. You shouldn’t try to build a financial plan based on the swamp of anxious thoughts floating around in your head either. An advisor can’t plan your financial future if they can’t see past your panic swimming around your ears.
However, once those frantic thoughts have been caught, digested, cogitated, filtered and fine tuned then harmony or realisation emerges. Once they’ve been quarantined into a place your financial advisor knows they can finally do their job. They can tweak and move things around. Identify your gaps, and sculpt you a personalised financial plan that optimises your taxes, protects your wealth, and grows your net worth.
Suddenly your snow-globe of cold, hard financial data becomes a structure you can build the rest of your life upon.
Roll with it Big Guy (the grizzly bear)
If your financial life feels like panicked fish right now, maybe it’s time to waltz into the woods. Sitting down with a financial professional and letting them feed all of your finances into holistic planning can be scary. Just like a hungry grizzly bear, holistic financial planning forces you to look at your numbers dead in the face.
But when you lean in for that hug, everything changes. The panic freezes, the advisor takes control, and you are left basking in the cozy comfort of knowing your future is a warm hug and that often makes things better.