Summary:
Matt Hudak AAMS®, CFP®, CEPA®, Financial Advisor and Chief Investment Officer, and Christa Hudak CFP®, ChFC®, CKA®, Financial Advisor and Chief Planning Officer for CoCreate Financial, explain their approach to financial planning by aligning financial decisions with a client’s core values, beliefs, and convictions to create more long-term satisfaction than traditional math-only goal setting.

2026.05.07

Full Transcript

Christa: Thank you for joining us today. I'm Christa. And this is Matt. And today we're going to be talking about how we approach helping you align your financial planning, your financial decision framework with the values that you hold dear, and how and why that's important to make you truly successful in the long term.

Matt: Yeah, and what we found is when you do this, you really have a lot more satisfaction in your outcome across the board. We've spent a lot of years kind of following a traditional approach to thinking about financial goals that's really just purely math based.

And what we found is that it doesn't really lead you to the most efficient outcome in terms of what you internalize. Oftentimes people are not saving enough and they feel afraid of the future, or they're saving too much.

And they're afraid to spend it when they really should be using that for something that's meaningful 'cause you can't take it with you.

Christa: And I'll just add like these conversations that what we're going to get into, they're where things really come alive and they're the hard part, because if you were to say, you know, I want to buy a house that's worth this much in this many years, that's just a math problem. That shouldn't be hard for us to figure out.

Especially as financial experts who can run the time value of money calculations. That's not a hard question. The hard question is "how do we get the goals right and how do we line this up well over time?"

Matt: Yeah. And when we're looking at this, we look at a few different things and traditionally this has been like we've talked about math-based calculations to say how much are you going to have when you're long gone? And how do you make it last for forever? And then just give it this pile of money to your heirs. And hope that they do things well with it that they live well, maybe even in a way that you didn't. And what we look at is there are really three different types of capital that we have to plan for at the same time.

The first one of these is your financial capital, and that's pretty obvious. It's your money, it's your debt, your assets, your house, your cars, your cash, your stocks, all the different things that you own. Your business, if you have a small business. This is your financial capital. It's the stuff we can measure and calculate.

We have to make a plan for that. We have to make it last. We have to help you deploy that in the present as well. The next thing that we have is your social capital. This is really your influence. This is the influence you have in your family, in

Christa: your community,

Matt: in your community, in your church, in your business, with your employees, with your employers. You have influence across a wide range of individuals.

How do you make the most of that? How do you impact those people personally? How do you leverage that as well to have more impact in your community and to live a life that's more fulfilling in your sphere based on your beliefs and values and convictions, which we'll talk about that a little bit later.

And the third type of capital that we have is sorry, I already said social capital, spiritual capital. And this is, what are the lessons these deeply spiritual things, that you want to pass on? What are the beliefs that you think are important that have shaped who you are? These look different for many of us. Our spiritual capital is very significant in our lives. We really value our spirituality and our faith, and it's a main driver for us. And we find that's true for most people of faith. But even if you're not a person of faith, you have this spiritual capital. How do you want to influence people on that deeply personal and spiritual level and shape those people?

What are those things that you can give? So when we're looking at these we don't want to save these up until you're gone. If you look at things like social capital, spiritual capital, it's really easy to see that it doesn't do any good if you just wait until you've passed away, and you've never been kind to anybody, or never cared or showed up for somebody, and you write them a letter after you've passed and say, you know you're going to receive this when we're at my funeral. It doesn't do anything. Right. It's obvious to us that those you can't pass after the grave, but financial capital is also something that you need to distribute and balance over the course of your lifetime. We don't want to see any of our clients starve in retirement, but we also want to make sure that our clients are able to live here and now and do the things that are meaningful and impactful all along throughout the course of their life.

Christa: And also, when we encounter people that have excess, you know, they've been good savers, they don't have extravagant lifestyles, and we're looking at the situation and there is in fact excess, we want to give them the opportunity to ask the question, how do I want to use this or distribute this during my lifetime, instead of just saying, well, they're happy with living on a lot less than their portfolio can generate, and it'll just go into their estate. But to give them that opportunity in the present as we assess things to say, what do you think the best choice of using this money is?

Matt: And it's a lot more fun to take that approach. So we really hope that we can engage these different types of capital along the way. And we use a values and beliefs filter to really help identify how that works.

Christa: Yeah. So kind of shifting to another place in this diagram that we'll have up on the screen, we have these concentric circles, and in the financial industry we tend to live on the outside of the circle and we want to talk about things like, you know, what's your family situation? Are you married? Do you have kids? Who are the people involved here? What do you do for work? How much do you pay in taxes? What other components are things that we need to fund or things that interact with the finances? And we tend to live just in that outside sphere of conversation. But what we find is that to really understand those things for our clients and to really drive forward on a holistic plan, we have to start at a much more core level, which is, what are your beliefs, values, and convictions, and how do those drive the things that are most important to you?

Matt: Going from that tangible outer circle to sort of almost through the circle that defines our passions to what's really at the core of those.

Christa: Yeah, absolutely. Because we find that this changes things and it also helps explain the things that are most important to us, and also filter out the things that maybe are not so important, and we can all come up with all kinds of goals, right?

And 'cause so often we just say, well, what do you want? And you're like, well, I can start spitting off some things that I think would be cool. And if you really lean into those, you'll decide that they're really important, and maybe they are.

But if we don't ask the question of why they're important, we can find ourselves going in the completely wrong direction.

Matt: Yeah. And whether those are career goals or recreation goals, travel types of goals that might be family, a family vision that you have, as we ask those questions of, well, what's driving behind that?

What's the driver behind that? What's the why? We have to do that even sometimes a few times.

Continuously. Yeah, continuously. And really, really dig. Dig down deep to say, you know, what are the pieces that aren't changing about this?

You know, when you get to the place of having that new house, what's still the same because once you get to your dream house, you have to figure out the next chapter and reinvent yourself. You have to have a new vision and a new dream. So there's something that has to be really more centered to align all of your goals so that you can be consistent and really achieve those things.

And one of the things I think that we found is a lot of these values, these beliefs, these convictions, these things that are core to our ourselves, they actually don't take a lot of capital.

They're often free.

Christa: Okay.

Matt: If you really care about having a healthy marriage, if that's a value to you that doesn't take money. Sure it's nice to go out to dinner or it might be nice to take a vacation with your spouse or do something. That's not to say that money can't add value. Your resources, if they're used well can bring some satisfaction to those, especially temporally.

But you know, in our marriage, we're married, by the way, if you don't realize that already. But in our marriage we get to spend time with each other. We get to work on our communication skills and we get to pay attention and actually look internally and say, am I valuing Christa? And that doesn't take anything. That's free for me to build good habits in our marriage and to pay attention. So, a lot of these beliefs and values and convictions that we find people have they don't take a lofty savings plan to get there to accomplish it. It's really about being disciplined and focused on the things that matter in the present, and then allowing the resources and the ways that you're using the capital to augment those and amplify your ability to be successful in those things.

Christa: Absolutely. And the other reality that we face is that goals are simultaneous, not sequential, and often in competition with each other. So, one of the things that comes up a lot that we see all the time is, you know, we'll have business owner clients who will have ideas or want to go on new ventures for growing their business, and they're really excited about those opportunities within their business.

And then they'll also say in the same conversation, and I want to spend more time with my family. And those are both very good things to be growing your business and spending time with your family, but sometimes they're in conflict with each other and that's just the reality of it. And there's no one size fits all answer to how to divvy that out or how to make that work.

But, to be honest, where we have to say we hold these values, and to get really real about what those are and what the most important things are, what the most important things are in different seasons, and be willing to say, okay, these values exist. These are the different things that I want to do. How do I align these up so that both can be accomplished when there is this tension of, you know, one seems to infringe upon the other?

Matt: And how do you reconcile that? To riff off that example, you might have a business idea that has a really positive impact in your community and that might be really, really important to you. And that might align with your values of having a really positive community impact of kind of, hopefully it's a little more specific than that 'cause that's pretty generic. But so you're looking at that, but you're also saying, I want to be there for my kids at this stage. Those are both really important and good things, and you might lean toward solving that in some sort of chronological prioritization structure. Or you might prioritize that by impact and say, well, I am going to go into work on the community impact and hope that's a good example for my kids.

That's social capital and spiritual capital that you get to distribute by giving a good lesson for your children. Or it could be I'm going to find a way to bring my kids along in that impact. And there are different ways that you can arrange that, but without identifying both the tension and then the value drivers behind them, you can't really reconcile those very well.

We find that this values alignment has so many different dynamics that it brings. Spending problems, those are usually heart condition problems. Those are usually, I want some to satisfy something that I don't feel like is being satisfied right now so I'm going to look at a thing to meet a need that I have that's really intrinsic.

And we get into these habits of overspending. We see marriages where people come in and they're not in alignment and they're having trouble talking about the finances. Well really, if we get these values alignment issues figured out, if we get them on the same page as one another on these core things, then the financial pieces start to fall into place a lot more easily.

And so we're able to work through those issues too. So this is a really powerful tool as we're going through and looking through this with people. We're really, really excited about the opportunity to walk through some of this journey with you. It takes a lot of work, it takes a lot of time.

We don't get to discover these things overnight about the people that we're working with. It's a long process of asking those why questions. So, we're really excited to explore this with you and to sit down and talk through these things, figure out what your financial capital looks like and your social capital, your spiritual capital, these beliefs and values and convictions, how these can drive your purpose, your impact, and lead you to a far more satisfied end result in your financial life as you go through your whole financial life.

So we look forward to meeting you here in our office and talking through this more.