5 Tips to Remove Stress From Your Finances – Tip 3- Establish Your Top 5 Values for Decision Making

Hi, Matt Blocki with EWA. Today we are talking about five tips to remove stress out of your finances. Our third tip to remove as much stress as possible out of your financial picture on a day -to -day basis is to, on a yearly basis, review your top values.

So we have a list, actually a deck of cards we take a lot of clients through and we love to hear feedback of, you know, what narrowed down the ten of the most important values narrow it then down to five.

So I love the quote, when you have too many priorities, nothing’s a priority. So making sure that you narrow the values down to five. Unfortunately, there’s always going to be competitions for your time in life and these are simply a guiding system for decision processes because everything from just a financial aspect sometimes the decision is just what’s the best rate of return, what’s the best investment decision.

Well, that may end up not mattering if you’re already on track and what matters is specific to you. So a values -based exercise can really help us understand our clients and guide them not just from a financial standpoint, make sure the money is supporting their life and they’re not making decisions on their life just to grow more money haphazardly.

So this exercise, narrow it down to the top five. If you’re married, definitely do this with your spouse and then discuss it. Out of those top five, then figuring out, you know, let’s just say hypothetically it’s health and family.

And then let’s say it’s meaningful work. Maybe it’s community. Maybe it is security. So those are examples of five values that we recently walked a client to. through. And so the next stage is where do we rank those?

After you ask yourself why, why was that important? So for example why I chose health is you know without health we can’t operate, we can’t work, we can’t enjoy time with our family. It’s one of the most important things so making decisions around eating healthy, exercising, sleeping well, all of those things.

Where does that rank today? Maybe I’m in a really stressful career and I ranked that at 5 out of 10 and then figuring out well what changes need to make to get this up to an 8 or 9 out of 10. And so from a financial aspect if we’re just looking at your finances we’d be saying work more, earn more, save more, college is expensive, you got three kids, retirement we’ve got a plan for, all these different things but in reality is life has to be balanced.

We have that balance now and we have to balance securing the future so it helps the five. There has to be a broader discussion around what is preventing us from getting to a nine. What do we have to get there?

What changes do we have to make in the financial plan to get from a five to a nine? Do we need just work hours? Do we need to outsource some stuff? Do we need to save a little bit less and outsource some stuff for free of time to build in?

Do we need to hire meal prep service? The list goes on. That’s an example. But we found having this conversation at least a minimum once a year, ranking them and then just asking ourselves what do we need to do to get everything to a higher number?

One thing I love the visuals. So if you have five values, let’s just use the example here. Let’s just say health was a five. And then let’s say family was a nine. And then let’s say meaningful work. I currently ranked as a six.

And then let’s say community because I’m so busy as a two. And then security because my financial plans, I’m working so much and have the money. Let’s say that’s an eight. Imagine this is like a life wheel.

So if we just look at where we currently stand. And we’re rolling through life. That’s going to be a really, really bumpy ride. It’s going to feel smooth for a second and it’s going to, we’re going to feel a lot of turbulence.

So if we instead had these all as an example of sevens, it’d be like a basketball that’s smoothly rolling through life. So these will typically all be in competition with each other until it’s not about getting it to a 10.

It’s about making sacrifices and meaningful choices to get the tension aligned well and make sure that all the paradoxes that exist in your financial plan, we’re able to remove as many of those possible and live your best life.

Thanks for watching our tips. We look forward to bringing our next tip on how to remove stress out of your financial picture.