3 Steps to Finally Start Your Financial Plan (No Matter How Behind You Feel)

Is February too late to start your financial plan? Thinking you've 'missed the boat' to get things going for another year, feeling like you're already behind.

The best time to start is 5 years ago. The second best time is TODAY. 

The start of the year can begin with enthusiasm. A strong list of things you’d like to get through. Be fitter. Get on top of your finances. Plan for that holiday. 

But then comes the grind of February. You already feel behind. Perhaps you haven’t started yet.

That cruisy holiday feeling has now turned into dread that perhaps that list of things you ‘needed’ to be done so you could start the year with a clean slate didn’t actually eventuate. 

But, February is not too late to take action. An ancient proverb describes the best time to implement your documented financial strategy as 5 years ago, but the second-best time is today.  

This means that after getting over the self-inflicted shame that it’s already February and you haven’t made the progress you wanted, you could then decide to get things going now. And that could start with the smallest step.  

To mix analogies, another proverb describes the longest journey as having to start at the beginning, and that beginning is actually the first step.  

Just one. 

What could this actually look like? 

The first step is awareness. Making change can only come from the knowledge of where you are now. For a financial strategy perspective, this is understanding your cash flows, your assets and your liabilities. 

So, get out the pen and paper or (my personal favourite) start off a spreadsheet and begin by listing out where you get your money from (salary, investments etc), where you spend it (downloading your bank statements), what you own (home, car, investments etc) and finally, anything you owe (home loans etc). 

The second step is understanding where you’d like to be. 

There is an entire literature and product industry built around goal-setting. Each person is going to be unique, but here is what you might think about from a generic perspective: 

• Where would you like to be living? 

• What will you be doing for work? 

• What experiences have you had? 

• What does your family look like? 

  
  

The final step is to connect these two areas (the now and the future), through action. 

Create a list of milestones that will lay out the path to the ultimate goal. Make them small; science tells us that large steps can be demotivating. They may even be tiny experiments, to learn the correct path, because steps 3 and 4 and etc might be too hard to know about yet. 

This final step is the most crucial.  

Goals (and their milestones) that are unwritten or just not implemented remain as dreams. And an unfulfilled dream, when the benefit of hindsight tells us that it was probably achievable, is one of the major causes of regret. 

What are some ways you can improve the likelihood of ‘dream conversion’? 

• Do the work. Consistently, methodically and routinely. 

• Be accountable. Utilise other people to help keep you on track. 

• Be realistic. Make the milestones achievable (be less concerned about the end goal and more about the journey). 

• Get help. We can’t all be experts on everything. You could speak to a financial adviser. 

For more of the guidance you need to build your wealth, book a chat with our team.

At Absolute Wealth Advisers, we help you optimise, grow, protect, and share wealth with purpose so you can live well today and leave a lasting legacy tomorrow.

We help people going through or emerging from *high net wealth divorce or inheritance who need help to simplify the complex, make sensible investment decisions in line with their values and relieve the administrative burden.