The Value Of Advice: Helping You Set Priorities

None of us would need guidance if we could all accomplish our life and financial goals at the times we choose. But the truth is that everything in life is a trade-off, and very little can be accomplished without requiring some compromise in another area.

Thus, the first step in accomplishing your goals is to make a list, weigh each one and prioritise them. This sounds simple but doing this on your own can be challenging. Developing and maintaining a plan to accomplish those objectives in the face of many obstacles is even more difficult. Here’s where advice and financial planning comes into play.

Setting Priorities

If anything defines growing up, it is the realisation that you can’t have it all. When you’re young, options might seem endless, but eventually everyone realises that both time and money are limited. Pursuing one goal inevitably means back-pedalling on another.

Delaying your post-secondary education while you’re still young might allow you to travel and experience new things. However, upon coming back home, you discover that your more accomplished colleagues have secured prestigious, well-paying positions, leaving you to question if it’s too late.

On the other hand, you may have been among those who continued to focus on books and your studies whilst others started to explore the world around them. Now that you’re in your 30s, married, have a mortgage, and kids, you realise that you never got to travel as much as you had wanted to.

You could be a person in their 40s or 50s, financially stable in a lucrative but uninspired corporate job, yet yearning to launch your own company and becoming more conscious of the short window of opportunity to do so.

Different Paths

Under any of these circumstances, there is no right or wrong response. Individual differences in priorities are a reflection of personal preferences, morals, and life ideologies.

However, it’s also true that as we get older and our circumstances change, our priorities vary too, and sometimes we are unaware that this is the case. We often tell ourselves that “x” is our top goal, but in reality, we have unknowingly moved on to “y.”

At these moments, consulting a financial planner can be a big investment in your own future. This isn’t because a financial planner will provide you with a detailed list of suggestions for what to do next; rather, their role is to assist you in identifying your true priorities.

After considering your existing circumstances, one of the first things a financial planner will ask you is what you believe to be most important in your life. Although most of us are afraid to ask ourselves this, it’s a potentially revealing question.

For example, if your greatest passion is being outdoors, then why are you spending your entire life in a city tower and fighting traffic to get to work every day?

You may, of course, respond that you do this in order to make ends meet—namely, to pay off your mortgage. “Okay, if money were no object, what would you change about your life now?” a financial planner might then inquire. That may cause you to reflect.

Making Better Choices

In these situations, advice serves to help you understand your values and assist you in making better choices with your life and money. The goal is to make the possibilities and obstacles that lie ahead of you more apparent, both imagined and actual.

After you’ve made your choice, a financial planner supports you by giving you a plan and a strategy to reach where you want to go and, most importantly, by holding you accountable and disciplined so that you follow through on your plan.

In the end, a financial plan combines a number of short-term goals to a long-term goal and tracks your advancement along your journey. A recommendation for investments will, of course, be included, but that is merely the means to an end.

The plan can be adjusted along the way if your priorities change. You have a financial coach available to help you in the interim by offering the direction, organisation, and accountability you require to finish everything.

Well not everything, but the important parts at least. They are termed priorities for this reason.