What's Your Starting Point?

What's Your Starting Point?

It’s difficult to arrive at your destination if you don’t know your starting point. When you’re booking a flight to your favorite vacation spot, you also need to tell them where you will be taking off from. It’s a necessary piece of the puzzle.  

It’s like the sign at the shopping mall that says “You are Here!” Knowing what tax bracket you’re in, the approximate amount of insurance you have, are you comfortable with the will/estate planning you have in place. All valuable information.

Your assets are things you own. It’s your home, investments, retirement accounts, savings. What is the value of each of those assets at this point in time? List all of those things on piece of paper with the value next to it. Add up the total value of those assets.

Your liabilities are the balances you owe on your mortgage, vehicles, credit cards. List all of those items along with the amount owed at this point in time and add them up.

Now, take your assets minus your liabilities and that equals your net worth. This is the indicator of how wealthy you are financially.

You may have a net worth statement that your Financial Advisor provided for you. Feel free to use that for this exercise, but take the time to truly look at it and think about everything that’s listed. Having an awareness and understanding of what your net worth means is what we’re really trying to get at here. Don’t just skip past this step because you have the answer in hand.

What I’ve found, working with clients, is unless you actually take the time to dig into this, you forget things. When someone else puts it together, you don’t give it the same attention. So spend some time on this. I’ve found when you really pay attention to it, you want to see every asset listed. Suddenly you remember things that didn’t come to mind when someone else did the work for you.

How do you think your net worth impacts your ability to achieve your goals? Have your money values and beliefs influenced the size of your net worth? View your net worth statement through the lens of your values and your goals. Are there changes you could make to get all of these in better alignment? Or does everything match up beautifully?

Conclusion

My grandmother, who had 12 children, 50 grandchildren, 100’s of great grandchildren and great-great grandchildren always said she was rich in love, and she truly was. Always remember your net worth does not equate to your self-worth.

What are your priceless assets? The gifts that make you special and unique? It’s really powerful to take the time to honor yourself.  We do it far too little.  

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Take the “Financial Happiness” quiz

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