One of the biggest reasons I love being a financial planner is the layered problem solving that helps clients make informed decisions about their future. Financial planning is never just facts or just emotions; it is both. My favorite part of the work is laying out a roadmap that says, “Here are the routes we can take to your destination. Which one feels best for you?”
After decades in the financial industry, I have seen a lot change. I have gone from crunching numbers in Excel and reading dot-matrix printouts to watching clients compare online tools, calculators, and robo-advisors. Understanding your financial picture can now feel more colorful, but also more complex. And with more tools comes more noise: more sources insisting their way is the “right” way. I have to be honest, that drives me mad. There is not one true way to reach your goals, whether they are short-term priorities or end-of-the-road plans.
Over the next few weeks, I am going to write a series of pieces called “Thinking Outside the Box.” I believe everyone deserves access to clear information about saving, investing, taxes, and estate planning. You can Google these topics to your heart’s content and still end up with a pot full of gloom, doom, and rules of thumb that try to convince you there is only one right way. Too many websites rely on outdated rules and scare tactics to sell you something—and that something is not peace of mind.
In this series, I want to make financial planning feel less like a set of rigid rules and more like a thoughtful conversation about choices. Each piece will take one common assumption and offer a more flexible way to think about planning for your own life.
What sort of boxes am I going to talk about? Inheritances, for one. Something that can sound simple—leaving an inheritance to children or other loved ones—can have real tax consequences. Many people do not realize that IRAs left to children are generally income taxable to them and now often must be withdrawn within 10 years, potentially causing significant income tax increases. You have options to mitigate these consequences. Or consider the common guidance that you should not touch your retirement account until you are forced to take required distributions (or on a tangent, that the required distribution age has changed and may not be 70.5 for you?).
This does not even begin to touch on something I believe deeply: many financial decisions are not about creating the largest possible estate at the end of your life. They are about balance—having enough to sustain a comfortable lifestyle, pursue your goals, care for the people and causes that matter to you, and sleep at night.
Let me say that again: it matters that you can sleep at night with the choices you make today. There may be fewer decimal points in your projected estate value at age 95, but your comfort level matters, too.
Take the journey with me, and let’s look outside the box together.