Football is a funny game. It looks so simple on TV at times – see guy, tackle guy, catch ball, block, etc. Once you learn a bit more about it, there’s so much more underneath the surface. Blocking schemes, quarterback reads, blitzes, route combinations, just to name a few. That’s all of the X’s and O’s of football. It’s fun now to see the live breakdowns of X’s and O’s during a game to see how plays actually develop in real time…technology is pretty cool.
But there’s something more to football that I’d like to tie to financial planning. Bear with me. Football is a team sport…more than just about any other game I can think of. If you have 10 guys running 1 play and one guy doesn’t do his job, the whole play doesn’t go anywhere. On a macro level, you can feel when a team isn’t rowing in the same direction. They’re flat. There’s no momentum. Every yard feels like a battle. Compare that to watching a team where everyone knows their role and executes. It’s a completely different sport. You’re not worried about first downs…you know you will get first downs. You worry about Touchdowns. Everything works in harmony and you start to achieve momentum towards your goals. Some teams’ goal is to score touchdowns. Some teams, like the Chiefs these days, have a goal of winning the Super Bowl. That’s how I’ll tie this into financial planning. If you don’t have every area of your financial plan rowing in the same direction toward your goals, it’s really easy for things to feel like a grind to make any progress.
That’s where a good coach (or a financial planner, to complete the analogy) comes in. We help you identify where you want to go. First, we identify your goals. Maybe it’s a new house or just to be comfortable on your path for retirement. Maybe it’s to start a business and build extraordinary wealth. Maybe you have the wealth and you want to be charitable with your time and your treasure. Whatever it is, we help our clients first set their goals and then make sure everything in their financial plan is pointed at that goal. That way, we’re all rowing in the same direction and you start to find that momentum for your goals that you feel when a football team is working together on the same page. If you have a goal of retiring early or buying a house on the beach in retirement, but your savings strategy isn’t adequate, it ends up looking a lot like a quarterback that keeps getting sacked because he didn’t set up his blocking well.
Our goal is to help our clients stay intentional with their financial plan to achieve their goals. That means making sure your whole financial picture is in line with your goals. From insurance to investments and from estate planning to tax management, everything needs to be working in unison toward your goals. Once we do that, we can work towards touchdowns instead of first downs... or, if we're lucky, maybe a Super Bowl.
Thank you for reading.
P.S. - This was my catharsis after watching the Packers lose their 3rd game in a row. Glad I could find a way to tie it to financial planning.