Earlier this year, we launched a fiduciary financial planning webinar series to help educate retirement plan participants on five steps they can use to put their goals first in personal financial plans. Our mission is to change the world one plan at a time, and financial education on proven planning processes is a big part of that.
We're presenting a webinar on each step of the simple, practical financial planning process that we use everyday to help our fiduciary financial advisory clients clarify, simplify and pursue their vision. These educational webinars are also designed as a public service for individuals in general who just want to get a better handle on their finances.
As we've now completed three of the five webinars, let's take a moment to summarize our progress to date. We hope this will both help webinar attendees prepare for our upcoming webinar next month - and make it easier for new attendees to catch-up if they want to jump in at any point.
Step 1 - Discover
In our webinar on goal setting and the discover phase back in May, we went through some exercises designed to align our values and goals. We started with our values climb exercise. Then we had Nick brainstorm his goals and just write down all of the things that he thinks he might want to accomplish that would require money and planning to achieve.
Finally, Nick took those goals from the brainstorming worksheet and got really specific in terms of quantifying and then prioritizing them. This gave us specific, personal financial planning targets to aim at. If you didn't get a chance to complete the goal-setting exercises - or even attend the webinar - we highly encourage you to do both before moving forward with the financial planning process.
Step 2 - Organize
We moved onto step two back in June, and that webinar helped us organize our financial lives. Here we identified and gathered the important financial documents we needed to define our current financial condition, and we reviewed some worksheets to help gain clarity on our living expenses.
This organizational work created the essential foundation for actually creating our financial plan. It's hard to create a fiduciary financial plan that puts your personal goals first without getting really clear about what your goals and values are - and organizing your financial life.
Step 3 - Create
Last month, we discussed creating fiduciary financial plans in step three. We discussed key tasks for creating the gap analysis for major areas of your financial life. We identified the different areas of our financial life that we need to plan for. Then we determined if we are on track for our goals and if there are gaps or vulnerabilities in our plan. If so, we walked through how to evaluate alternatives and plan for filling those gaps to achieve our personal goals.
Register now for step 4 next month - Implement
Please register now to join us next month - on October 24th - for our webinar on Implementing Fiduciary Financial Plans. With the optimal plan created, we move on to implementation in step four. This is where we actually make the changes to how we manage our financial lives that we identified during the plan creation phase.
Mark your calendar for step 5 in December - Execute
To follow through to the end of our series, you'll want to mark your calendar for 1pm on December 19th and our webinar on fiduciary financial plan execution in step five. We'll discuss monitoring and managing our progress. As our circumstances change, step five helps us make the necessary adjustments to stay on track - and avoid day-to-day "financial entertainment" media distraction from our personal goals. What could be a better New Year's resolution for 2020?
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