Investment Strategies, July 2019 Update | Spring Planning

We love, love, love summer. It might seem odd, given that our name is “Spring,” but there is a method to the madness. See, we love summer so much that we spend a lot of time planning for it, to get it right and to maximize our enjoyment.

It is the same approach we take with your financial, estate, and cash flow plans. We want you to maximize your enjoyment of your life. Yes, that might mean optimizing your savings and investment strategies. It might mean minimizing your taxes. It might mean making the most of your insurance policies.

It might also mean none of those things, or just some of them.

The point is not to have the most marbles at the end of your lifetime, or look like the smartest kid in the class. That’s only fun for a short period of time. It’s not just about numbers and math either. We love numbers and math, but they aren’t what makes your life well spent (see what we did there?).

What makes your life well spent is knowing what you really want, and pointing your entire ship — including, of course, your money and your taxes and your insurance and your real estate and your trust and your business and your legal documents and your investment strategies — in that direction.

It’s why we’ve been writing Design Thinking articles all year long (and have another one for you this month!). We really, really, really want you to have a great life. We want you to be satisfied that not only are you striving toward those things you want, but you’re also doing a bunch of those things you want right now. Future You isn’t the only You.

Sometimes we are asked to quantify the ROI (return on investment) for the plans we create. Will we be able to specifically state where how many dollars have been saved on taxes or added to the bottom line?

The answer is: maybe. And we’re not too fussed about that one way or another. If we happen to help you save money and make money while we’re working with you, that is amazing. But it’s not our first order of business. Our first order of business is to help you figure out how you would really want to spend your life, if money wasn’t actually the thing that mattered, and then design your plans and your finances around that.

Your success — whatever that looks like — is genuinely our success. It’s why we decided that we won’t take compensation from outside sources, even though it’s a heck of a lot easier to make money that way. It’s why we decided that each planner will work with the clients who have situations that the planner really loves to work within — rather than having clients work with whichever planner is physically close. It’s why we design our work around our lives rather than our lives around our work. We know that happy planners create excellent plans for great people who go on to live the lives they want.

At Spring, we are constantly removing the “shoulds” and the “because it’s always been that way” from everything we do. We believe that looking at every aspect of our services and our operations from a design thinking perspective will help us do the same for you, in your plans. It’s why we take the time to hire and train paraplanners, who can add greater depth and perspective to your plans. It’s why we have weekly planning meetings and annual retreats. It’s why we created the Advice Only Planners forum and work collaboratively with experts in complementary fields. We are constantly working towards being the best possible planners we can, every single day, so that you can get the best possible plans with which to move forward.

This month, we hope you’re stepping back to experience everything summer has to offer. There won’t be another summer 2019 for you — or for any of us. Get out there and enjoy it.

If you’re casting about for a bit of reading, of course we’ve got some great stuff for you, courtesy of Sandi, who volunteered to do all the writing this month. She’s got her top reads: a snack-sized summary of articles worth paying attention to, a review of by Celeste Headlee AND a design thinking perspective on preparing for emergencies.

Happy Summer!

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Originally published at https://springplans.ca on July 22, 2019.