So, what is financial planning? It’s a topic that comes up quite a bit because financial planning in and of itself is broad, and it has been done a lot of different ways in the past. Is it just getting help with my investments? Is it managing a budget in my cash flow, or is it getting me hooked up with right kind of life insurance? Financial planning covers all those areas. Now, if we look at comprehensive or holistic financial planning, we want to analyze all aspects of a person’s financial life to make sure it lines up with their goals. For some people that is identifying what their goals are and then getting them put on a path to help achieve those goals. If we think of financial planning like baking the first step of baking is figuring out what you want to make, which for financial planning is helping identify those goals and what you want your future financial life to look like. So, once we figure out what we want to bake the next step is to find the perfect recipe, any good recipe is going to list step by step instructions and have a complete ingredient list for us. The ingredient list for financial planning can include things like investments, taxes, cash flow, estate planning, college planning, insurance, and on and on. If you’re like me and you’re not great at baking, you need that step-by-step instruction with specific measurements of everything to make sure that you don’t put in too much salt and not enough sugar because trust me I’ve done it before and taste terrible. The benefit of working with a financial advisor is it is somebody who has experience crafting these recipes or financial plans for multiple people. Any good financial plan is going to be able to adjust with you along the way, so just like any good baker can help give you a gluten free or keto recipe, any good financial advisor can adjust with you through any curveball that life throws at you. All this talk about baking is making me hungry so until next time don’t be afraid to take that NEXT STEP.