Money Minded Families

6Your Baseline Values and Goals

In my financial planning practice, I work with people every day to help them achieve their goals. Most of my clients' goals involve things like helping save for children's college education, helping realize a dream of owning a business, retiring early, or creating a foundation that will live long after they are gone. All these things require people to really think about what is important to them, and what they value most. Once we determine what's important to us, we have our baseline and then we can build a plan to help accomplish those goals.

Values and goals serve to clarify, validate, and channel our behavior. While it can be difficult to define our goals, consider how one of my favorite financial thinkers, Carl Richards, in his book, The One-Page Financial Plan (2015), describes goals:

1. Goals are guesses. I'm giving you permission to relax as you think about goals. No one knows exactly what they are going to be doing 17.5 years from now. No sense in laboring over a false sense of precision. Guess. Just get started.
2. Goals are flexible. It's possible to be completely committed to a goal and at the same time open to changing it. Don't change your goal just because it turns out to be harder than you thought to reach it. But you can change it if it no longer represents what you think you want to do. Remember, it was a guess.
3. Goals are yours. Not your neighbor's or Instagram's. Yours.
4. Think big goals and micro-actions. Having a big, scary goal ...