The Most Important Part of the Plan
How often have you set out on a cross-country journey without a map that tells you what highways to take to reach your destination? Yes a GPS counts as a map. And even more to the point, if you were living in Brentwood Long Island in New York and wanted to go to Mist Oregon with a stop over in Council Hill Illinois, how confident are you that you could do that effectively? I’ll go out on a limb and say it would not happen. Most people these days couldn’t navigate east to west without a lot of trouble much less find those locations.
My point here is that you need a map to guide you to the end of the journey. In this case your map is your financial worksheets. They will show your starting point and your ending goal and then you can fill in the needed steps in order to make that happen. If you keep them undated regularly and correctly the worksheets will show you where your financial trip is deviating from the actual course and if you see that one particular area is moving particularly far away from the desired results then you can decide if it is worth making some adjustments in that portion of the plan to get you back on course.
Now the other side of that is that you might find that a particular area of your decision is doing much better than expected. If that happens to be the case then you can adjust that portion as well and take advantage of the portions of the financial journey that are doing much better than predicted.
Your worksheets or map should have both the long and short-term aspects of the plan outlined. That is because you rarely want to take any kind of action on the long-term portion of the design. You see most of the things that you have in that portion of your financial portfolio will show change when looked at over a short period of time. The thing is that when you look over the results in terms of years and not weeks or months you should notice that this portion of your portfolio is steadily increasing in worth. You need to step back and look at the bigger picture rather than move in close and look at this section with a microscope and you will be much less jittery as you review it.