Exploring the financial house, honesty, and groupthink

Welcome to the Intentional Dollar weekly newsletter — great work taking this small step to move your money forward. I’m Logan, a Certified Financial Planner™, and I’m excited you’re here!

What’s inside?

• One tool to experiment with

• Two quotes from others

• Three questions to dig deeper

• Four lines of poetry for the point

_{One tool to experiment with:}

The Financial House:

Is your financial house in order? If you were to pass away today — what plan is in place for managing your financial house?

Our financial houses, or estates, contain everything we own. And like our real homes, there’s little benefit to maintaining a messy financial house. In a messy home things easily get lost. And if someone were to come in looking for a specific document, they’d have no clue where to start their search.

This is why it’s critical to have an estate plan in place.

An estate plan is not one specific document, rather a plan of dealing with all your assets and personal items when you’re gone — it’s the closing out of your financial house. Estate plans typically include beneficiary titling, wills, POAs, medical directives, testamentary trusts, and ad hoc final wishes.

What they often leave out, is a map, or a ledger of the things you own.

Another problem with these instruments is they are often ignored until we receive a diagnosis, suffer a close call, or personally administer the estate of a deceased relative. It typically takes a reflection on our finite existence and ever-creeping demise to prepare a plan.

It’s fair to procrastinate on this topic. Reflecting on our demise can be a morbid and somber thought, so it’s easy to defer. Most of us think we can do this later, and that we’ll have plenty of time to take care of estate planning when we’re older.

Despite being young, or healthy, or hopeful for a long, full life, tragedy doesn’t discriminate and never politely warns of its arrival.

So how do we clean up our financial house?

To start, this is not a legal substitute for wills, trusts, asset titling, or other ordinary estate planning devices, and this won’t bypass probate. This tool solely focuses on a way to centralize and organize the things in your estate — it’s a simple map to help guide the closing of your estate.

A qualified estate planning attorney will be able to provide legal specifics if your situation necessitates; though, most people don’t need complex estate plans. Generally, the most common and effective estate planning tool is beneficiary naming — check now and ensure your accounts name the appropriate beneficiaries.

Think of this tool as a ledger containing the major things in your financial house. It could be a simple spreadsheet, or sheet of paper, that lists out the major items in your estate and essential information connected to them.

It might look like this:

• 401(k) — company website, username, beneficiary

• IRA — company website, username, beneficiary

• Bank account — company website, username, beneficiary

• Safe — combination

• Life insurance policy — company website, beneficiary, type, death benefit

• Wills — last updated, location

• Home — property titles, mortgage information

• Cars — titles, loan information

• Advisors/Accountants/Attorneys — contact information, summary of services they’ve provided

This isn’t a comprehensive list, or a distribution strategy for these things, but a way to centralize them. The idea is that you share the location of this map with someone that would administer your estate. We don’t want our loved ones aimlessly searching for how many IRA accounts we have and where they are located.

This is a living document, and you can modify it to be as inclusive, or as simplified as you want. With increasing reliance on social media and digital assets, you might include various usernames and passwords — so you’ll certainly want to secure this document.

My wife knows that if I go, there’s a “Logan’s gone, now what?” document that lists our accounts and steps for her take.

It’s much easier to follow a map than memorize detailed steps and directions.

This document won’t bring someone back, and it won’t prevent grief; however, it greatly reduces the stress, and the mess, of someone passing with an unorganized financial house.

_{Two quotes on honesty:}

It takes a policy of intentional honesty to avoid self-deception with money habits. As you would with others, use tact, not a hammer.

_{Three questions on groupthink:}

1. Where am I mindlessly following others with financial decisions?

2. Am I doing this because I want to, or because everyone else is?

3. What if the majority was wrong about X?

Which question stuck with you? Questions like these are spotlights for the mind. Reply to this email and let me know which one shined light on a previously dark cave.

_{Four lines of poetry for the point:}

Contact Me:

Content ideas, questions? Reply to this email or reach out to me at [email protected]