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

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

We’ve all heard the stories of people who were completely focused on goals like retiring by age sixty or having $1,750,000 in the bank—they might reach them, but when they look back, they see a trail littered with broken relationships. What many of these stories share is that disappointments often come when people are so focused on outcomes that th

If you hit a dead end when it comes to figuring out what’s most important to you, there are two places to look that should give you a clue: How you spend your time

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

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.

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

It’s about being really honest about where you want to go, getting really clear about where you are now, and then making your best guesses about how to narrow the gap between the two.

know this may be hard to accept, but for most of us life insurance plays one role: it replaces an economic loss. Insurance is an expense, not an investment. It’s not a way to accomplish your investment goals or pay for an education. And perhaps most important of all, it can’t replace an emotional loss.

Then you can start listing some other goals you know will need to be addressed. They can be short-, medium-, or long-term goals (remember, you’re just guessing): I can see the car will need to be replaced in five years. We want to retire by age sixty-five. We want to pay down our mortgage in twenty years.