YOUR REASON FOR LIVING > MONEY

The bulk of people are done with taxes now and I hope that includes you. I hope you’re done, that you didn’t have to file an extension and, if you owed, it wasn’t egregious. If you’re a CPA or other tax professional, I hope you’re on a beach somewhere, Mai-Tai in hand. 

I’m mostly glad I won’t have to write about taxes for a while. You see all these components (taxes, insurance, investments, estate, etc.) are important, but they aren’t your life.

Your financial life is not your life and shouldn’t be the only measure of your success. Keep that in mind as you look over this Venn diagram showing the Japanese way to find ikigai, your reason for living.

It’s true that we really only have two forms of currency in life: time and money.  As you spend them, remember that only one of these can be regenerated.

I once heard someone say that if you want to know where someone’s heart is, look at where they spend their time and their money.

I love that so much I’ve adopted it as one of my “instant character assessments” along with observing how people treat service personnel and how they park their cars.

Following that logic, if you find that your finances don’t accurately reflect your heart, or in Advocates terms, your values, a correction is needed; maybe in tweaking your current state of affairs, or perhaps starting fresh with the vision for your life and goals designed to support it.

Lots of people engage financial advisors only in pursuit of good or better investment returns than they’re receiving currently. And that’s a valid choice for some. We also want to provide good investment returns, but it’s our ikigai to do more, and we don’t necessarily believe your ikigai lays at the deep end of a pool of money.

Rather, we view your financial success as a supporting structure for your life’s work, your reason for living. That amounts to a lot more than your balance sheet.