Grand Designs

27 September 2024

FINANCIAL PLANNERS – A good place to start a Lifestyle Financial Planning process is in the loft.

Bear with me…

It’s Saturday morning and someone’s asked you for something you think might be in the attic.

So, you drop the ladder down, grab your torch and off you go on an intrepid adventure into yesteryear.

Because that’s what the attic holds – memories of days gone by.

You never simply go up, grab ‘the thing’, and leave, do you?

No, instead you start opening boxes, uncovering all sorts of strange and fascinating items – things that once meant so much that you invested both your time and money in them.

But there came a point when they were relegated to the loft because they were no longer important to you. You had moved on with your life. Yet instead of acknowledging that those moments had passed, you stashed them away in a misguided attempt to convince yourself you’d return to them one day.

You could, if you were so minded, retrieve all those items from the loft and lay them out in a timeline of when they were important to you.

Like the rings of a tree, they would narrate the story of your growth and evolution into who you are today.

And someday, the things that matter most to you now will be just another box in the attic. Part of the cycle.

The point is, as you move through life, you change and evolve. What’s important to you today may no longer hold the same significance in the future.

That’s part of the problem with Financial Planning and Cashflow Modelling. As Financial Planners, we’re often too focused on showing that the things you desire now can be achieved in the future, without considering whether you’ll still want those same things by then.

Take ‘Grand Designs’ as an example. The TV programme where intrepid self-builders embark on some epic project to build their dream house for them and their young family. They design playful spaces and funky bedrooms for their children, filled with misty-eyed visions of an ideal family life in this dream house.

Fast forward 7 years and they are broken, physically, financially and mentally. Yes, they have built (sometimes) an epic property to house their perfect family, but the children have left to go to college with their childhood memories being of brick dust, arguments, and parents that were too busy building a house to spend any time with them.

Meanwhile, the parents sit in a house that’s now too large, wondering what happened to that perfect family life they once coveted.

The simple truth…?

They took too long to get there.

In life, many people often make the mistake of believing they’ll always have time to do the things they want and live the life they dream of. But the reality is, they may not.

What they need, is urgency.

An urgency to do what they want to do, whilst they still want to do it.

Sometimes, the best way to get urgency into someone is to frighten them.

Just a little.

My ‘Time Focus Guide’ lists of all the key new items, pop songs, celebrity deaths from the last 40 years. Things that seem so long ago and yet only yesterday bring into sharp focus how fast time goes by in life, and how fast our lives change with time.

By taking clients on a journey back through time and encouraging them to recall the years gone by, you can help them see the “rings” on their tree. The boxes in their loft, if you like.

And if they want to pursue the things that matter to them now – their current goals, dreams, and desires – they need to act before the next ring grows.

Because let’s face it, we’ve all underestimated how long-ago things really were.

For example, if you were born before 1984, your birthdate is closer to World War II than it is to today.

And if you were born before 1971, it’s closer to World War I.

Let that sink in for a moment.

But not for too long.

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