The Elements of Planning

Financial planning is a system to enable you to identify and reach your money-based goals by making wise lifetime decisions about how you make money, how you invest it, and how you spend it.

Elsewhere in this module we deal with the important topic of creating your plan, providing a step-by-step process for identifying and reaching your goals. In ensuing modules, we focus on the major areas that you'll have to consider when you start to actually construct your plan.

As you work through the following five basic elements, you'll see your plan taking shape. You'll recognize how each of these parts impact the whole and how they fit together. You can begin at the beginning and work down; or begin at the end, with tax issues, and work back up; or just dive right into the middle . . . the important thing is to begin.

• Building your investment plan: We aren't going to pretend that we have the key to an investment strategy that will put you on easy street or make you wealthy (although we're not saying that can't happen). What we can do is explain the nuts and bolts of investing that can help you help yourself.
• Insuring your life, health, property and everything else: When adverse events might cause losses that can be quantified in dollars, we can anticipate them and manage them to mitigate the consequences.
• Planning for your retirement: The prospect of a comfortable retirement is like the proverbial carrot dangling in front of us, encouraging us to keep going in hopes of a future reward. The only difference is that, unlike the carrot that is always just too far away to reach, a comfortable retirement is actually attainable.
• Planning your estate: Certainly, a big part of estate planning deals with clearly establishing who gets what after you are gone and making sure that your wishes are carried out in your absence. However, estate planning deals with a whole lot more, as you will learn if you read on.
• Tax planning: We'll tell you about the many ways you can save taxes by structuring your affairs to take the greatest possible advantage of the existing laws and regulations.