What's important about money to you?
Build a financial plan that works by identifying your core values.
Having a financial plan is important, but having a financial plan based on your core values is life-changing.
In Bill Bachrach’s book, “Values Based Financial Planning: The Art of Creating an Inspiring Financial Strategy” he takes you on a journey to identify what’s important about money to you. Not what’s important to your friends, neighbors, or co-workers, but what’s truly important to you.
It starts with a simple question: what’s important about money to you?
But it doesn’t end there. In Bill’s book, he guides you through the exercise of continuing that question, inserting each answer back into the sentence, until you’ve identified what’s most important.
For example, what’s important about money to me?
My first answer is always freedom.
The freedom to do what I want, when I want, with the people I want, for as long as I want is what’s important about money to me.
But then, what’s important about freedom to me?
Easy: freedom lets me have control of my time.
But what’s important about having control of my time to me? Having control of my time lets me spend it with the people I love.
Perfect, now we are getting somewhere. This continues on and on as long as needed, until you’ve identified what’s most important about money to you.
Bill writes that “it’s at the highest level where the greatest connection between your values and your financial future is made—usually seven to nine answers up the Values Staircase.” (Though he’s seen as many as seventeen.)
Bill calls these core values “Level 3”—similar to the highest level on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Some examples of core values that Bill has heard through his work are:
fulfillment of my destiny or purpose
becoming the best human I can be
spiritual fulfillment
being one with the universe
total inner peace
nirvana
enlightenment
Whatever the case for you, Bill writes that “at the third level, you gain a sense of the real purpose of your life and can reflect on the ways smart choices about money impact all of your values.”
And I believe that can make all the difference. Because once you’ve identified your highest purpose and core values with money, that becomes your foundation. Then, every single money decision, action, or opportunity you’re faced with builds on that solid ground.