Posts Taged financial-success

Your Advisor’s Role in Helping You Navigate the Path to Financial Success

We’ve talked about how your financial advisor is an essential guide on your journey toward your financial future. But what exactly should your financial advisor do as you navigate the highs and lows, twists and turns of your financial journey?

Your Advisor can Help You Look Beyond the Plan

Even though your financial advisor will offer you a plan to help you set your strategy in motion, at the end of the day, the plan isn’t the final destination in your planning journey. In a dynamic market and ever-changing financial environment, a financial plan can only offer so much.

This isn’t to say there is no value in a plan. After all, a plan gives you an idea of where you’re going and some steps you’ll take to get there. A plan helps you to organize your activities around an end goal, but it’s not the only thing you should focus on.

Your Advisor is Prepared to Guide You Through

Your advisor doesn’t have a crystal ball to see into the future and give you clear numbers to expect one year, five years, 25 years down the line. But your advisor does have tools to help you get through whatever obstacles you’ll encounter on your financial journey.

If you were to take a backpacking trek through a mountain range you’ve never traveled before, you’d hire a guide to help you get through safely and help you find views and scenery you might not have reasonably found on your own. However, you’d never expect your guide to give you a detailed weather forecast for each hour of your trek. Nor would you expect details about when you’d encounter wild animals, a downed tree across a portion of the path or an unforgettable sunset scene.

You would want your guide to have some essentials, like a knowledge of the trails you’ll travel and a sense of the natural features and climate in the area. You’d also expect them to carry equipment like a first aid kit and radio communication device in their backpack.

Similarly, your financial advisor is equipped to help you with the ups and downs you’ll encounter as you navigate your financial journey. They have the tools to help you work through unexpected portions of the path and the insight to help you prioritize your path depending on the outcomes you’re looking to achieve.

They can guide you through these events with pointed advice or recommendations that you wouldn’t have otherwise considered. Even though your advisor can’t predict every twist and turn, they can help you select products, actions and services to help you navigate terrain with which you’re unfamiliar.

Gear Up for Your Financial Journey

Whether you’re ready to start your financial journey or want to correct your course, look to a financial advisor who has the tools to help you navigate your pursuit of financial success. After all, the journey is a lot easier and more enjoyable when you use the help of a guide who knows the ins and out better than you do.

Your financial advisor can give you the guidance you need to monitor your progress along the path and help you update your plans along the way. Remember, just because you’ve chosen a route doesn’t mean you can’t benefit from regular updates and assistance with making implementation decisions as you go.

Your next step is as easy as contacting Certified Financial Planner, Jacob Sturgill

    Navigating the Path to Financial Success

    Plotting a path toward your financial future can seem fairly straightforward: you set your goals, build a portfolio, and wait for your investments to grow. However, making progress with your plan, as with making progress in most parts of life, is hardly a linear process.

    You should start your financial planning journey with an end goal (or goals) in mind and an idea of how you’re going to achieve it. Then you’ll work backward to fill in the gaps and create a guidepath for that journey.

    Expect the Unexpected

    On paper, the path from where you are to where you want to be will look and feel like a straight line. But in reality, over time and with life changes like a new job or a cross-country move, the path is going to lose its crisp clarity.

    Some portions of the path will experience high highs, like when the market is booming or you get an amazing promotion and raise at work. And some of the portions will take a seeming nosedive as you experience losses like unemployment or the death of a spouse. At these times, it will look like your portfolio has moved away from where you think it needs to be to achieve your financial goals.

    It can be hard to avoid the euphoria that comes with experiencing the high points or the fear that comes with the low ones. But it’s during these times that you need to remember that your overall financial journey shouldn’t be measured by where you are during a single portion of that journey.

    Trust Your Navigation

    Think of how you travel when you take a road trip. Sometimes, your GPS updates in transit and takes you around bodies of water, road construction, or traffic accidents as driving conditions change. While this new route or detour may not have been planned, trusting the guidance still gets you where you want to go.

    In reality, a straight line between where you are today and where you hope to be in the future likely doesn’t even exist. Change will be constant. Some of it, like how much you save, how much you spend, and how you react to different situations, will be in your control. Many things will happen that will be beyond your control and you’re going to possibly need to make adjustments to get to where you’re going.

    Even if the path doesn’t stray far from what you expect, you’re inevitably going to have to stop for gas (or a charge!) at some point – you just don’t know where or when.

    Find a Trustworthy Guide

    When navigating your financial journey, your financial advisor can act as your personal GPS, steering you around unavoidable hurdles, like laws and regulations that impact your investments the same way that natural bodies of water dictate where roadways travel. Your advisor should be able to read the road ahead well enough to know when to steer you clear of the traffic accidents or road construction that unexpectedly pop up to block your way.

    Instead of insisting on the mythical straight path, embrace the ups and downs as you travel your financial journey. Focus more on the destination and less on your current position on the path. Before you know it, you might be closer to your goals than you ever thought possible.

    To learn more about plotting your financial journey contact Jacob Sturgill.