How to Eat an Elephant: Achieving Financial Success One Bite at a Time

Introduction

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time!

MANY TIMES IN LIFE WE are faced with a task we don't like, or a task that is difficult to manage because of its size. By learning what needs to be done and then doing it in small, bite-sized pieces, we can complete these tasks successfully and reach our goals.

People make financial planning and management out to be a huge task. They tend to get discouraged and quickly feel overwhelmed. Unfortunately, they believe they don't have the confidence, knowledge, and ability to do it. They have less and less trust in those giving advice because of the constant sales pitches and a lack of real, unbiased advice from so-called “advisors.”

For many years now, when clients have approached me to prepare a financial plan, I have asked them to pull together a variety of documents in order to prepare a comprehensive financial plan. These documents give me important information about their financial situation and what they would like to achieve. Clients often feel that the amount of work they need to do and the quantity of information they need to pull together are overwhelming!

To help them overcome this fear and stress, about 10 years ago I started breaking down the information needed from my clients into much smaller, more manageable, bite-sized pieces. When they came to me and said, “Oh my goodness! That seems like a lot of work!” I would ask them to do one exercise and return that information to me. When I got that back, I would then ...