BUSINESS NEWS - George Kinder is known as the father of the Life Planning Movement. He founded the Kinder Institute of Life Planning which has now trained over 4 000 professionals across 30 countries in Life Planning.
Life planning focuses on the human side of financial planning. It puts people, not products, at the center of analysis and advice, helping clients meet unique goals and unlock the greatest meaning in their lives.
In his early career as a financial planner, Kinder began formulating a framework for identifying meaning and finding purpose in his client’s lives. He felt that by focusing on the human element of planning, he could better advise his clients on their financial lives.
The framework became known as Kinder’s 3 Questions.
I am going to take you through this framework.
The exercise is really a series of questions. The questions are intended to help people to imagine, and then step into, a more meaningful and purposeful existence.
The first question involves money, and you’ll see, as we move through the questions, they move to deeper and deeper levels of meaning.
So, starting first with the first question – question 1 asks you to reflect that you wake up one morning and you discover that you have all the money that you need for the rest of your life. It’s like winning the lottery. You’ve got it. It’s there.
The question is – what would you do with your life if that happened? How would you live your life? What would it be like?
Take a moment or two to reflect on each of these questions.
Second question goes deeper.
Here, I want you to imagine that you go to your doctor. You feel perfectly healthy, but the doctor has been doing tests. The doctor shocks you with the news that you have a rare illness. There’s good news and bad news.
The bad news is that the illness will bring about your demise in 5 to 10 years. You’ll just keel over. You know that you’ll live for at least 5 years, but beyond that, you don’t. The good news is that you’ll feel as healthy as you feel right now.
The question is – what would you do with your life? How would you live your life?
You can see that this is a deeper place, a deeper question than the prior question.
The third question goes deeper still. The scenario starts the same as the previous question. You go to visit your doctor. Your doctor stuns you this time with the worst news you could have. And that is that you only have 24 hours left to live. You’ve had an illness even though you didn’t know that you did. And it has come to term.
The question is not what you would do with those 24 hours. The question is reflecting on all of the things that you’d imagined doing with the rest of your life – What did you miss? Who did you not get to be? What did you not get to do? It’s a deep question.
Earnest. Reflective. Profound.
Financial planning and life planning should go hand in hand. Financial planning is about growing investments, reducing tax, optimizing risk coverage, building estate plans. It speaks to structuring these assets to align with your goals. But how do you define those goals?
Buying a house? Retiring with a certain level of income per month? Going on vacation?
Sure, these are all admirable financial planning goals. But by incorporating a bit of life planning into our financial planning, we may just be able to define better, more meaningful goals that better align with our sense of purpose and fulfilment for ourselves and our families.
Have a great week.
Matthew Matthee has a wealth management business that specialises in retirement planning and investments. He writes about financial markets, investments, and investor psychology. He holds a Masters Degree in Economics from Stellenbosch University and a Post Graduate Diploma in Financial Planning from UFS. MatthewM@gravitonwm.com
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