I believe every one of us is searching for significance and satisfaction in life.  My work as a financial advisor has put me in contact with a lot of different people at differing levels of wealth and poverty, and I’ve become convinced of a simple truth:

Success, satisfaction and significance aren’t born out of your account balance or income, but are achieved by the way you engage life in the present.

Each moment is packed with potential for eternal significance.

We are constantly making significant decisions.  They don’t always look like life-changing opportunities, but they are always in front of us.  They’re choices that build on one another—like the times you’re in a rush to get something done and you decide to break from your frenzied routine and tell your spouse how much the matter to you.  We make little choices everyday that we don’t think about.  We choose to watch show after show on Netflix instead of reaching out to a friend.  We walk by friends and acquaintances asking them if they are well, decidedly content not to engage in their response.  (What if we did?)

We make choices all the time.  Some of them are smaller while some are larger.  some of them are financial, some of them spiritual, and other are relational.  As a financial advisor, I generally see people when they are thinking about financial decisions.  In reality, there are a few different types of capital we need to think about spending, investing, and growing.

One Thing… Another… or Neither?

Here’s the thing about these small decisions that create this kind of eternal significance.  Every moment in which we act, we take a step forward on one path or another.  Even indecision, or inaction is a step forward in the timeline of our lives.  We create futures with these steps, building them into a masterpiece, or we leave them weathered, worn and underdeveloped. We pursue our passions, or we let them fade.

The hard truth in this is that we make choices that don’t lead us to this kind of significance and success all the time.  When our priorities are misaligned, we find ourselves on facebook instead of face-to-face with the people who are right there.  At other times, we do things that insulate us, from communities and our own fears.  We choose to be disengaged or to build up walls to protect us from our fears or even from self-understanding.  Decisions like these are often ones of apathy because it can seem easier to continue on the path of a disengaged life.

Engage Life!

The fantastic news is that each of these moments is new.  You can live in a way that makes each moment significant, STARTING NOW.  Every day, we encounter opportunities to engage life in such a way that we will make an eternal impact, creating a future for ourselves, our families, and our communities. 

I encourage you to start engaging life on purpose.  Though there is no set path to follow, I’ll be writing about a few simple ways get started in my next post “Engage Life – living on purpose.”

One of our core philosophies is somewhat unorthodox, but it makes sense.

Money has no value on its own.  It’s paper, with some special ink, and cotton.  In today’s financial world, it might only be a number on a hard drive somewhere recording your account balance.  If I have two pieces of paper, one being a one-hundred-dollar bill, and the other a blank sheet of paper upon which I hand-scrawled “$100,” the former has value and the other does not. What makes the difference between two materially similar items so dramatically different?

Some people would say its faith in the currency system, but it’s actually much more than that.  Money is exactly as valuable as what it is used to accomplish.  We might say that a bank account with $5000, has a nominal value, but $5000 that is used for something—to buy a boat, pay for a grandchild’s college, or drill a well in Africa, has functional value.  Financial planning is the practice of connecting the functional value of your assets with their nominal value and then maximizing both.

As a result, one of the first steps in creating your financial plan is to identify the “functions” that are significant to you.  These break down into two categories: quality of life and world impact.  The quality of life are the self-oriented needs and desires you have.  These are the basic questions that every financial planner would learn to ask in business school.  “What are your basic monthly expenses?”  “Do you plan to travel?” “Do you foresee any major expenses like starting a business or remodeling your home?”  I call these self-oriented, but they are not selfish or un-important.  These are the reasons most people have built up their assets, and a good financial plan will help you accomplish these and it will integrate them with your world impact.

The term “world impact,” isn’t necessarily as extreme as it sounds.  People are fundamentally human, and we exist in the context of community.  We cannot escape it, and we aren’t fully complete as people unless we participate in it.  Our community is made up of our families, our neighborhoods, our towns, states, our country, and the global community.  World impact, means impacting one or more of these areas.  Each of us has a world impact, whether or not we choose it.  When talking about your impact, it’s important to note that it is yours.  Some of the things people do with their impact: help a grandchild pay for college, volunteer as a big brother or sister, sponsor a child with Compassion International, provide clean water to a remote village, start a business, teach a young person a trade, spend time with you kid so they know they are loved.  These are all parts of significant world impact, and we all have unique parts to play.

Our financial plan either helps us accomplish these things, or hinders our ability to engage the world around us.  A good financial planner will help reconcile the two so you are better equipped to live the life you were meant to live and will help you recognize the functional value of your assets.  If the plan focuses on just one, then you’ll end up either living a lonely, lavish life, or playing catch-up because you weren’t prepared to fund your basic needs.

The Co|Create way is to create a future in which you can make the most of your quality of life and your world impact…together.

It can be hard to figure out the best investment options for your retirement plan. In many cases the target date funds, the general default for most 401(k) plans, are less than ideal. If you have a workplace retirement plan, whether it’s a 401(k), a 403(b), or some other type of plan, a Co|Create advisor will gladly help you determine the best allocation using the same evidence-based, data driven processes we use for the investments managed in-house. 401(k) consultation is billed at a flat fee of $100 for the first plan and $75 for each additional plan. It is important that you evaluate your portfolio’s allocation at least annually. If we manage your other assets, this service is included at no cost.

As a business owner, it’s hard to carve out time to work on your personal financial plan, and to-do list items like setting up employee benefits and creating ways to make an effective succession plan remain on the back burner until they are either imminent or it’s too late. 

Some of the services we provide to businesses and their owners are:

• Employee retirement plans.  These include the common 401(k) and SIMPLE IRA, to more complex plans.  We’ll help you look at your business needs and identify how you can best leverage a retirement plan for employee retention, tax savings, or even to help encourage employees to retire sooner.
• Strategies to retain and reward key employees.  You may have one or two people your business depends on.  There are a number of ways to make sure you keep their loyalty.  These plans, are complex, customized, and require expertise in design and in the way you fund them.  We’ll help you identify your need, establish, and fund the plan.
• Identifying and reducing business risks through diversification
• Strategies for selling your business (sooner or later).  The most valuable asset most business owners possess is their business itself.  Selling your business, is something to plan for years in advance so that you can make sure it transfers efficiently to the ideal person and also so that its value is optimal.  People who plan ahead tend to win at this.  If you own a business, make a plan to create value whether you sell next year or in 30.

Your ability to live the life you want rests squarely on your shoulders. This is true in the present and in the future. Understanding this is key to leading a successful life, financially and otherwise. The short-form of a financial plan for someone who is in what we call the Accumulation Stage of life, is “save as much as you can as early as you can.” Given the power of compounding, it makes sense for a long term plan. There are, of course, many factors that complicate the simplicity of saving this way. It also doesn’t make sense to save rapidly without a plan, because you could end up sacrificing the life you want to live now for resources you may not entirely need later on. CoCreate strategies seek balance, so you can pursue your passion now and in the future. CoCreate strategies for savers include a broad scope of consultation, coaching, and management activities. Some of the most common are: 

•Helping you determine what you are saving for.
•Helping you determine your capacity to save for your future, and discovering ways to increase your savings.
•Helping you to identify ways you can maximize your resources to live in the present.
•Creating a plan to continually measure your progress in attaining your goals.
•Managing investments for retirement AND pre-retirement goals.
•Helping you evaluate real estate and business investment opportunities.

Retirement means something slightly different to everyone. Traditionally, it means wrapping up your career and enjoying “the golden years”—riding off into the sunset. More and more, people have a new definition of retirement. They want to find fulfillment in a second career, or explore the world (whether by RV, plane, or fishing boat). Others want to give their time to their communities and their grand-children. You could be one of these types or a blend of all of them. In any case, you are unique in your purpose and desires. 

One thing each definition of retirement has in common is what we call Financial Freedom. You’re no longer a slave to your career for the sake of paying the bills. It means you have significant choice in what you do because you have arrived at a place, financially, that can sustain you in a variety of different options. Our job is to facilitate this financial freedom. Some of the services we provide to accomplish this are

•Cashflow Management – from Social Security benefits, to investment income, to rental proceeds.
•Asset Management – managing your investment assets to generate the income you need as safely as possible, so you can focus on living.
•Risk Management – this obviously includes managing investment risks, but goes further to helping you consider other risks you face, like over/under spending.
•Goal Prioritization – It’s easy to spend your resources on the unimportant thing immediately in front of you instead of what you really care about. We’ll regularly review your financial priorities to help you keep them in focus.
•Tools for the Next Generation – You’ve stewarded your resources to this point, and you’ll need to be asking the question about who the next steward will be. The most overlooked component in estate planning is preparing them for the task. Our job is to equip you to do so and provide whatever assistance you need along the way.