Sometimes life’s big milestones arrive in a neat, straight line. And sometimes that’s just not what happens—or what we want to happen. How do we plan for a swoopy life?
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financial goals
Enjoying the Fruits of Your Labor
by Mark Leibman
We’re inspired by recent conversations with clients and friends whose plans, as they say, have come to fruition.
Fruition—the realization or fulfillment of a plan or project—scarcely begins to describe the satisfaction and joy we’ve seen.
What types of projects?
There’s recent retirees who downsized to a maintenance-free home, going to art festivals instead of pulling weeds, having more dinners with their descendants, and seeing more ball games. There’s the people going on that Alaska cruise or the tour of Italy. There’s the people turning hobbies into true avocations.
These are just some of the plans we’ve seen come to fruition for people we are close to.
A wise person once said that a plan is a dream put into writing. We are in the business of trying to make the arithmetic work for people who would like to try to make their dreams come true. We’ve written before about the best way to retire, and the point is, dreams are personal.
What are you trying to do? Where do you want to wind up?
One of the privileges of long experience in our work is seeing the realization or fulfillment of those plans made long ago. But life sometimes throws curve balls. So we’ve also seen adjustments made by people who would have preferred to avoid the need to adapt. Not everyone we love lives as long as we wished, health may be fleeting, and circumstances often present a mixed bag. Nevertheless, sound plans usually put us in better shape to deal with the unanticipated.
Money is not the most important thing in the world. But it is also true that our resources can buy us options we might otherwise not have. Wealth may free up our time, and time is what life is made of. Dreams and arithmetic working together may make the best things more likely.
If you would like to discuss your dreams and plans in greater detail, please write or call.
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A Hunch Is Enough
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” A new school year will be starting soon for many, but it’s not just children who feel like they have to have answers to the big questions. New clients will on occasion visit our office with apologies ready: they don’t exactly know what they want or what they might need in the future. And that’s okay. Plans and hunches and visions… It’s all welcome.
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Making the Story Come True
Even heroes get knocked down a time or two when fighting their monsters. There may be a couple of bumps in the road, but what good plot doesn’t have some conflict? With our passions in mind, a little bit of perseverance, and a good plan, we all get to be the hero of our own story.
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The Momentum Will Build
It might help to think about financial goals like a line of dominoes. Only one domino needs to fall at first, and the momentum will build. We don’t have to do it all at once 🙏
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The Hats We Wear
How do we get from where we are to where we’d like to be? Sometimes it’s hard to imagine how we’ll close the gaps. The good thing about the big stuff is that we can only get them done one step at a time. We might wear many hats in life, but along the way… we can only wear one hat at a time. 🙏
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The Power of Dominoes
When Life’s Not a Straight Line
Sometimes life’s big milestones arrive in a neat, straight line. And sometimes that’s just not what happens—or what we want to happen. How do we plan for a swoopy life?
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Are They SMART Goals in a Dumb Pond?
by Caitie Leibman, Director of Communications
Use SMART goals.
Be smart about it.
Work smarter, not harder.
You’ve probably heard this advice at a juncture in life; maybe you’ve even said it to someone else. Goals don’t get us very far unless they are explicit, meaningful, and can be tracked. Without them, aren’t they just dreams? “Hope is not a plan,” I’ve heard it said.
None of this is meant to be cynical, but I’m thinking about an important distinction: having “smart” goals won’t matter if they’re pointed in a “dumb” direction. So let’s get out of that framework. Smart and dumb are relative anyway (not to mention judgmental!).
The fit of a goal matters. For those of us youngest children who ever wore hand-me-downs, you know that even the stuff in the best shape isn’t quite right if it wasn’t picked for you. Alignment of a goal matters too: the thing better fit into the big picture. Does achieving a big purchase now help me live the life I want, without side-tracking my long-term goals? Just an example.
And your goals stay yours. Then it’s part of our job to make sure our strategies stay aimed at those goals.
We, too, strive for good fit. We don’t splash around in “opportunities” that don’t align with our principles. We seek bargains, we focus on owning the orchard for the fruit crop, we avoid stampedes. If it’s not in alignment, it could be a distraction or a tangent.
Jane Fonda once put it nicely: “If I want to make ripples, I better be sure I’m throwing my pebbles into the right pond.”
“Right” is relative to your life, your vision. We’re just happy to be part of the effort. You decide when it’s time to check in on your goals and direction.
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Play the audio version of this post below:
SMART Goals in a Dumb Pond? – 228Main.com Presents: The Best of Leibman Financial Services
This text is available at https://www.228Main.com/.
In Which Numbers and Feelings Become Better Friends
“We figure out what we want with our feelings. We learn everything we can learn from the numbers.” — Me
Sometimes new clients are surprised when most of our work together is conversation. There’s very little button-clicking on a computer that will do us any good while we’re meeting. And there’s no chart or binder just sitting in my office—or anywhere!—that can tell us what we need to know:
- What does money mean in your life?
- What are your goals?
- What’s working? What could be better?
There are choices to make that do involve some math, of course. That’s a big part of our role. But your job? Figuring out what you want and how you feel about how to get there.
In their book No Hard Feelings, Liz Fosslien and Mollie West Duffy explain, “When people talk about decision making, they tend to assume that feeling something and doing something with those feelings are the same thing.” Some folks notice a feeling swell up in the process and try to shoo it away, thinking it will only gum things up. Surely, if we “open the floodgates, we’ll be bowled over by the crush of our emotions.”
But that’s not giving ourselves much credit, is it? Gut feelings aren’t random signals. They can be clues to our self-knowledge. Ever bought a house, juggled job offers, or gone on a first date?
Our feelings can help us figure out what we can live with and what we cannot. And as we’re fond of saying, “your money, your life.” No matter what happens in our conversations, clients, you’re still the one that has to live with your life—not us.
We’re here as collaborators, coconspirators… you get the idea. Reach out when you’re ready.
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Play the audio version of this post below:
It's All About the Numbers and Feelings but Also Numbers and Don't Forget Feelings – 228Main.com Presents: The Best of Leibman Financial Services
This text can be found at https://www.228Main.com/.
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