Increase your knowledge and accelerate your ability to take leadership in the management of your own personal finances and lifetime investing. This ten-step personal financial planning process will help you optimize the management of your financial planning and investment management affairs over your lifetime, while greatly reducing the unnecessary waste of your money and your time. Step 1 – Develop your personal investment and financial planning skills
Because you must live with the results, you are completely responsible for your financial and investment success or failure. Delegating financial planning and investment decisions to advisers largely on faith can be very dangerous. Naive hope without adequate personal financial knowledge, attention, and control can be very risky to your personal and family welfare. The only practical solution is for you to increase your personal financial planning and investment knowledge and skills.
Educating clients about scientific investment and financial planning is extremely important to me. As such, I have written many educational materials that are of interest to my clients and the general public. My scientific finance publications on The Skilled Investor website and blog are usually the reason that people learn about my fee-only, independent financial planner and investment consultant services.
Step 2 – Set your personal savings, earned income, and other financial planning goals
The single most significant financial lever that individuals control directly is their management of personal expenditures. The second is their lifetime effort to obtain sufficient income. Most people simply do not save enough of their current income to fund adequately their future needs.
To analyze your financial affairs in detail, use VeriPlan. VeriPlan is a very sophisticated and customizable computer planning model that I have developed in-house. VeriPlan enables you to view graphical projections of your family’s income, expenses, assets, and debts across your lifetime. Data inputs reflect your particular situation and include all your assets, including cash, bonds, equities, property, real estate, private equities, and business interests.
Step 2 is a very important step, because this is where we construct your baseline financial plan and measure your current financial circumstances and goals and intentions for the future. (For more information about VeriPlan, see: About VeriPlan — Personal Finance Software for Your Lifetime )
VeriPlan can vary future expected investment returns by asset class, and it automatically analyzes the details of your taxes and investment expenses. Any and all assumptions can be changed for instant “what-if” testing. [...]