Month: August 2017

“If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll never get there.” – Yogi Berra

Don’t talk about risk, and especially don’t talk about insurance, when that’s the only thing on the agenda.  You wouldn’t shop for eggs without the recipe for cake, and you shouldn’t shop for insurance unless you know the recipe for your financial plan.  Because let’s all agree that insurance is just a way to finance things that would otherwise derail a financial plan and by itself serves no other purpose to the buyer.

So the best time to talk to me about risk is when you’re done with your financial plan.  What do you have?  What do you want?  Where are you going? How are you going to get there?  Finalizing the plan itself can be hard work, and achieving the plan is 10 times harder, requiring a lifetime of commitment and discipline.  But all that difficulty makes my job working for you that much easier, ironically, because as you feel the effort of building wealth you start to realize that you don’t ever want to go back and start all over again.  Protecting the financial plan starts to sound like a good idea real quick.

Building wealth and attaining life-fulfillment is hard, and sometimes the more of the former you get, the less of the latter you experience.  My father-in-law once said that at some point he started to feel “the tyranny of ownership” and the worries that increased in the process of adding to his life’s financial complexity.  But that worry makes my job of working for you that much easier, ironically, because as you feel the worry increase during your season of wealth accumulation you start to realize a desire to have someone help you unburden the weight of concern over threats to your family’s prosperity.  Someone watching your back starts to sound like a good idea real quick.

And I use the word “insurance” a lot because society colloquially associates it with protection, but insurance is just 1/4th of the risk-management strategies you should employ to your financial plan and we help with all 4.  We believe that protecting wealth can free capital to build prosperity so that your passions and your cares are met.  So if you’ve got a financial plan for where you’re going and are somewhere near the dashed-grey line below, we’d like to help.

Photo:  Rachael McGraw, Flathead Lake, MT