Making Meaning With Money
The most gratifying moments in the career of a financial advisor are often found at their clients’ most significant mileposts: celebrating a retirement, a child’s college graduation, making that last mortgage payment. These truly are the fruits of our shared labors with our clients.
These positive moments in life are marked by something seemingly foreign in our numbers driven industry – nonquantifiable emotions. How can you measure a sense of accomplishment, a feeling of fulfillment or living true to your purpose?
The reality, of course, is that you cannot. And despite knowing what most people seek in their lives may be more about what certain accomplishments represent than the action itself, the industry remains hung up on what can be measured and commodified.
It is easy to forget that true wealth is never purely financial, and that money is just a means to an end. There are the relationships you have with your loved ones, your standing in your community and having freedom over your time which are tremendous assets that will never show up on a balance sheet.
How would our relationship with our money be different if we aim for what we can attain but cannot quantify? Imagine a financial plan built to help you pursue your purpose and live a more fulfilling life. To start down this path, let’s take a look at a useful tool for reconfiguring the way we perceive wealth and our plans with it.
Most people were taught at some point in their life about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which categorizes our needs as humans ranging from our basic physiological and safety needs ascending to our needs for self-fulfillment and self-actualization. The Wealth Planning Pyramid[i] utilizes a similar approach and provides a template for advisors and their clients to follow when planning to do more than just attain financial goals or manage money.
The Wealth Planning Pyramid
The foundations of this hierarchy are set in the familiar areas of money management, budgeting, insurance protection and goals-based planning. When you think of working with a financial advisor, these first two tiers are generally what come to mind. Unfortunately, this is also about the extent to which many advisors work with their clients.
It would be reasonable to assume that there would be great joy and satisfaction for someone to have all their money needs (the base of the pyramid) met and to at least be on track with meeting their financial goals (level 2 of the pyramid).
These are important aspects of a comprehensive financial plan, but many advisors stop at these levels, leaving their clients unfulfilled and following a plan out of sync with their values. Much of this foundational work can be generic and impersonal, which is why new technology and automation are beginning to replace traditional advisors.
When you align your financial and non-financial life in pursuit of fulfillment, purpose, and abundance then you can set yourself up for a more meaningful relationship with your money… and truly your world.
So what matters to you? What kind of legacy do you wish to have? What does living a life with purpose look like for you? In seeking answers to these questions an individual is operating at the upper levels of the Wealth Planning Pyramid, where family, community and legacy are key.
A comprehensive financial plan that is informed by these higher-level needs has a greater impact by helping individuals and families make meaning with their money.
[i] Developed by Buckingham Strategic Partners