FINANCIAL LIFE PLANNING

Ross Levin

If little scrolls of wisdom could be passed around the financial world , what would they say ?

I wondered about this and thought : What if I owned a restaurant that served wealth management fortune cookies ? What would some of them say ? This is what I came up with .

Wealth management is resource management , and resources go far beyond wealth .

We all know that when we are doing our best work with our clients ( not for ), we are helping them see what is possible and working to make their actions and values become more closely aligned . We may use money as a catalyst to talk about what is possible and what matters , but money is only a piece of someone ’ s physical , social and spiritual resources .

A client couple once spoke to us about switching their residency out of Minnesota . They have a home in Arizona , where the income and estate tax state are less burdensome . Our models showed how much they could save by replacing their two Minnesota homes with one and then turning the Arizona property into their primary residence .

But after we came up with that solution , our conversation turned to what the clients wanted their lives to look like , where they wanted to

We may use money as a catalyst to talk about what is possible and what matters , but money is only a piece of someone ’ s physical , social and spiritual resources . grow old , what type of community mattered , and even what kind of clothes they are most comfortable wearing ( the last is a great litmus test for the kind of place you want to live ). Turns out the tax numbers mattered less to these clients than a dozen other things .

In Michael A . Singer ’ s book The Untethered Soul , he writes , “ When a problem is disturbing you , don ’ t ask , ‘ What should I do about it ?’ Ask , ‘ What part of me is being disturbed by this ?’”

It feels good to come to a quick solution . But sometimes when we seize upon one too quickly , we miss other things that might have changed our recommendations . With the couple who wanted to move , we ended up having a far richer conversation with them than we would have had if we had simply solved the tax problem . We ended up uncovering things that were ultimately more important to them and they rejected the residency switch .

A partnership works better if you can see what you are doing wrong too , not just what your partner is doing wrong .

I ’ ve been in a 36-year business partnership with Wil Heupel . As we struggled to build our business early on , I was generally the big picture guy and Wil somehow translated my ideas into actions . I worked externally , Wil internally .

I was especially adept at noticing what was wrong with him . I initially

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