The One-Page Financial Plan: A Simple Way to Be Smart About Your Money

don’t forget some stretch goals that might not be at the top of the list, but which may be closely related to your values—such as the desire to give your kids some of the opportunities you never had. We’d like to take a small family trip each summer. We’d like to help our kids for the first one or two months after school while they look for a job.

I asked them one question: why is money important to you?

Here’s a “three-guess process” for estimating how much your goals will cost. Once you’ve guessed at each goal, take another guess about when you’d like to achieve it, and how much it will cost. This process won’t make the future any less certain, but it will help ensure that you’re ready for the things you’d like to have happen, and prepared for th

Once you write down all your guesses, begin ranking each goal in terms of importance and urgency. Sometimes you will have to deal with something that is urgent, like paying off a credit card bill, before you can move on to long-term goals, like saving for retirement. When you have to weigh different goals against one another, use the values you ide

Now, consider a third example. In this situation, you have kids and all the financial goals that come along with them. You’re going to have education to pay for, you’re going to take vacations, and you’re relying on both incomes to support those goals. In this case, if one of you were gone—in other words, if one of those incomes were no longer ther

This process can be eye-opening: it allows us to see whether our goals are in line with our values.

What have you tried to help you achieve the goal? What sacrifices have you made?

It may help to think about the different kinds of human capital in units—units of time, units of energy, and so on. Each day, you take some of your units and exchange them for units of money. You then take those units of money and spend them on something. But every time you exchange a unit, there’s a trade-off, and we often fail to look past the im

Stop giving me options I’m not qualified to evaluate. Please. I’m begging you. . . . Just tell me what to do.”