Making It Personal: Crafting a Personalized Mission Statement
By
Jeff Motske, CFP®
January 14, 2019
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I am a big believer in personalization in all aspects of life. The road to your goals, financial or otherwise, is paved by the personalized steps you’re willing to take and in the direction you wish to work. Driving all of that should be more than an idea or a simple plan. What is needed is a personal mission statement. A mission statement creates a sense of purpose and authenticity that acts as a compass and drives all your decisions in the right direction.
When creating your mission statement, be sure to keep it brief. Just one to two sentences will do. Approach it the same way you would approach starting your own company, reflecting your goals, your dreams, and your values. At the same time, be sure that it extends beyond your professional life and encompasses your personal life and your lifetime goals as well. Once you have your personal mission statement, be sure to read it or recite it daily.
Lastly, make sure that your actions reflect your personal mission statement. Your mission statement is meaningless if you’re not committing action to it. If your statement reflects your family values, be sure to make time for your family. If your mission statement focuses on financial independence, make sure that you’re sticking to a budget and have an all-encompassing plan. Be sure what you’re doing reflects what you claim to value.
Life can move fast, and everyday decisions can distract from your long-term vision. To ensure that you stay true to what you value and on course with your goals, create a mission statement to act as your compass and ensure that your life truly reflects you.
The opinions voiced in this material are for general information only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual.
Many Americans spend more hours than they’d like managing necessary financial components of life while balancing caring for a family, performing at work and enjoying time with loved ones. Despite working hard to try to strike a perfect balance, financial planning, saving and investing can be tedious and time consuming, and maybe even daunting.
This is where a fiduciary comes in.
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What Is a Fiduciary?
The term fiduciary is thrown around in the financial services world, but few people truly understand it.
A fiduciary is a person or organization that acts on behalf of another person or persons, and puts their clients' interests ahead of their own. A fiduciary has a duty to act in good faith and serve clients by earning trust and confidence. Being a fiduciary thus requires being bound both legally and ethically to act in the client’s best interests.
To the Financial Advisors at Trilogy Financial, it’s more than that. Yes, we believe “fiduciary” means putting clients best interest before our own. However, we take it steps further to demonstrate with evidence that our proposals are in the client’s best interest. The evidence, be it in a financial planning concept or investment strategy, is the key to being a fiduciary.
Why Is It Essential To Work With a Fiduciary?
When a fiduciary presents evidence that their proposals are in the clients best interest, it leads to confidence. That confidence leads to good financial decisions over time. As Life Planners, that is what Trilogy’s Financial Advisors are working towards.
A fiduciary's main goal is to help set clients on an upright financial track through financial behavioral coaching, accountability and to help clients develop a Life Plan. A financial advisor and fiduciary will also help you prepare for retirement by maximizing the profitability of resources directed towards saving plans, develop estate plan strategies and more.
As Advisors, we anticipate individual’s or family’s needs over time, which allows us to be a better fiduciary. We believe a true fiduciary guides clients through life’s roughest patches and toughest situations.
Let a Fiduciary Be By Your Side When Life Planning
Let’s face it…a fiduciary can help ensure your financial goals are aligned in the same direction as your ambitions. Right? Proper financial planning requires objectification of your goals through the hands of an excellent financial partner who can help you with the following.
Help you save for retirement
For many, having $1 million worth of liquid cash and a list of profitable assets by the time they retire is a dream come true. However it’s a difficult dream to work towards for many Americans. That’s where a fiduciary comes in.
The secret to getting the retirement and lifestyle you dream is preparedness and time. The earlier you begin to save, the better. Beginning early allows you to make small contributions that will accumulate to a lump sum amount over a long period. For instance, if you start saving $5,000 every year from your mid-20s, by the time you are 40 years old, you will mostly likely have crossed a quarter a million mark. Remember, you will still be young, energetic, and even determined to save more. Because compounding is so powerful, if you continue saving the same amount by the time you are 65, you could be almost at $1.5 million, more than what you had intended to save.
In contrast, if you start saving at 35, even if you double that amount to $10,000, you may stagnate at $840,000 by the time you hit retirement age. So, the earlier you begin to save, the more you will receive at retirement. But do not be deterred if you are starting later in life. With the right planning, it’s never too late to achieve your goals. A Trilogy Financial Advisor can develop strategies to compound savings through investments and other growth opportunities.
Save for education stress-free
According to Market Watch, an average American will spend over $58,464 on their child's education from primary school to the undergraduate level, doubling the UK's average spend and tripling France's. Now imagine you are the head of a typical American family with more than 3 dependents; you will need almost $200,000 for education alone. This is a huge dent in a family's finances. Fortunately, a fiduciary can help you save for education and college. Saving about a third of your earnings for a decade with the purpose of spending it on education will take the pressure of school fees off your shoulders.
Grow your wealth
The potential of growing your total net worth is an exciting process. Our Financial Advisors help you to navigate investment opportunities and mitigate risk, serving as guides as you work to grow your investments. At Trilogy Financial, we believe investing is about more than positive returns. Growing your wealth is a tool that can help you achieve financial freedom and live the life you’ve dreamed of. A fiduciary can coach you through building out the investment portfolio that aligns with your unique goals, and empower you to make the meaningful decisions to pursue your life dreams.
Plan your estate strategy
Due to the complex nature of estate planning, estate strategies should be tailored to your unique needs. And each strategy should aim to protect and preserve your assets for future generations.
Regardless of the value of the estate, a fiduciary will help you plan for the estate by:
Ensuring your beneficiaries receive what you’ve planned for them after you pass
Planning for lifetime gifts through trust and minimization of diminishing estate taxes
Helping you to pass assets or a business to your younger generations
Identifying powers of attorney to ensure your wishes come true
Trilogy Takes a Bold Financial Approach
For us, care is at the center of everything we do as fiduciaries.. We care about each client like they’re an extension of the family. Every day, with every piece of advice, we empower our clients to live wealthy. Ready to explore the benefits of working with a fiduciary? Review Trilogy's Financial Life Planning Tool to see some of the areas of focus we’d suggest on the path to financial freedom.
Bottom Line
A fiduciary helps you make critical financial decisions that are in your best interest, for your Life Plan. Our Financial Advisors work with clients nationwide. Regardless of your location, we have an office nearby or a virtual way to connect from the comfort of your home.
Fiduciary investment advisory services are only offered through Trilogy Capital (TC), a Registered Investment Advisor. TC markets advisory services under the name of Trilogy Financial (TF), an affiliated but separate legal entity. TC and TF are separate entities from LPL.
Do you want to start investing but fear you will be buying in at the top of the market? Well, what if I told you there was a way to invest in which you could take emotion out of the equation altogether, not only banishing market anxiety but actually taking advantage of dreaded market volatility? Too good to be true? Far from it. The panacea exists, and it’s called dollar cost averaging or, as we call it in the finance world: DCA.
Dollar Cost Averaging is a pretty simple financial strategy: you purchase a set dollar amount (say $300) of securities (stocks, mutual funds, etfs, bonds…you get the idea) on the same day each month. Because you are committed to a set dollar investment the total number of shares purchased will vary from month to month based on the market. In months where prices are increasing you receive fewer shares; however, in months with falling prices your money buys MORE shares.
How does this benefit you? It removes emotion from the investment equation by keeping you from attempting to “time the market” (which has been proven to be impossible) and helps establish the saving behavior necessary for long term financial success. You are not waiting for a certain price to be reached before buying and when markets are experiencing volatility you are not selling and sitting on the sidelines waiting for things to settle down and then attempting to determine when to buy back into the market. Rather, you are using a disciplined strategy to steadily contribute to your long term goals and when the market is on sale, prices are declining, your monthly contribution has more buying power.
Here’s what’s even better: you are most likely already taking advantage of DCA as part of your financial plan, without even realizing it! If you are contributing to an employer sponsored retirement plan like a 401(k) (which you should be!), you are taking advantage of Dollar Cost Averaging by setting aside a certain percentage of your pay and investing it on set days each month. But why limit a DCA strategy to just one segment of your financial portfolio? You can leverage Dollar Cost Averaging to efficiently build individual accounts for shorter or medium term priorities such as travel, a new car, or purchasing a house. It’s not magic or rocket science, but Dollar Cost Averaging can help take advantage of volatility in markets, remove emotion from investing, and establish a beneficial pattern of saving for future priorities.
While dollar cost averaging is a powerful financial tool it is only one component of a full financial plan. If you would like to talk more about the impact of dollar cost averaging on your personal financial plan please contact me at zach.swaffer@trilogyfs.com.
