Why Financial Planning?

I am always advocating creating a plan for your financial life – but why plan? Maybe we can identify some factors which may motivate you to develop plans for your life, incorporating financial factors with the rest of your life.

Following are some of the more important factors that you may want to think about:

1. It is a way to prepare for the inevitable future. This fits in with one definition of planning, which is “intelligent cooperation with the inevitable.”
2. Planning identifies problems and points the way to solutions. Taking a systematic, thorough look at the situation and thinking about the future possibilities can bring these things to light.
3. It helps us to do first things first. In other words, it provides a rationale for assigning priorities. Should we save more for retirement, or for college? Should we pay off our home mortgage?
4. Planning helps to coordinate your various goals with one another. For example, you need to make sure that adequate funds are being set aside for family vacations, while still putting aside funds for college and retirement.
5. Planning can educate, involve and inform you and your family about the various goals and situations that you have to account for within your financial world. Planning can be a real eye-opener.

Now, just so that you won’t think that this concept of planning is a new idea, I recently came across the following endorsement of the concept of planning:

Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Will he not first sit down and estimate the cost to see if he has enough money to complete it? For if he lays the foundation and is not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule him, saying ‘this fellow began to build and was not able to finish.’

Or suppose a king is about to go to war against another king. Will he not first sit down and consider whether he is able with ten thousand men to oppose the one coming against him with twenty thousand? If he is not able, he will send a delegation while the other is still a long way off and will ask for terms of peace.

In case you don’t recognize the quote, it is from the New Testament of the Bible (NIV), the book of Luke, chapter 14, verses 28-32. Obviously the concept of planning is important – considered by Jesus Christ to be what we call today a “no brainer”. That’s a pretty powerful endorsement, in my opinion.

Hopefully these factors have helped you to understand the importance of planning – and that you are inspired to begin developing your own plan. Because your life will go according to “a” plan, you might as well make it “your” plan!