Your money and your values

Genevieve Signoret

(Hay una versión traducida al español aquí.)

My job as a wealth planner is to deliver serenity. Serenity requires integrity, and integrity requires that our decisions and conduct flow from our deepest values. So, in the early days in my relationship with all new clients, I try to glean what their deepest values are. Also, more and more, I try to incorporate into my practice explicit discussion and even documentation of those values.

Today I’m going to share with you some of the questions about clients’ values the answers to which I try to glean from them early in our relationship and prod them to think about and discuss with me periodically over the years, so I can lead them in a planning process that will deliver the kind of peace of mind integrity alone can bring.

My hope is that, by sharing these questions with you, I can help some of you, too, clarify where you want to go in life and how you see money helping (or hindering) you in that journey.

Your money and your duty toward family

Self-sufficiency versus communalism

Picture your children or other younger relatives making financial sacrifices to take care of you in your old age. How does this scenario make you feel? What does this feeling say about your financial priorities, at least in theory? How well do you think your conduct lines up with those priorities?

What kinds of family help did you have in getting your financial start in life? How do you feel about that help or lack thereof? What are you doing or what do you intend to do differently with your own children? Why is that? How is it going? What worries you in this regard?

How financially autonomous do you hope for your children to become, and how quickly? Are you and your spouse aligned on these questions, or do you need to put more work into becoming aligned?

Assuming that you can afford to, do you aim to educate each child all the way through graduate school (possibly abroad), or just through college?

Do you hope to buy each child a house, or merely lend each money for a house or a down payment on a house, or none of the above?

Do you see it as your job to set each up in business, lend money for a business, be a minority shareholder in their business, give them a stake in your own business, give them your own entire business, or simply give them business and career advice?

Where does your spouse fit into your business succession planning?

Do you and your spouse or life partner see your various combined financial assets as shared? Or as belonging to each, separately? This is not a question of how you are set up legally but rather how you think and talk about your combined assets. How does this map into your separate and joint financial decision making? Are both sides comfortable with this?

Assume that you could pay for all tuition for all of your descendants as long as you lived. Would you? How about their health insurance? Vacations? Summers abroad at camp? Or are you on the other extreme, do you think you would help your children more by insisting that they contribute financially even to their college tuition, then cutting them off financially shortly after graduation? What do your answers to these questions reveal to you about how you prioritize family communal values on the one hand and those of individual achievement and self-sufficiency on the other?

Money talk at home

To what extent do you divulge the details of your family finances to your spouse and children? Why or why not? Have you tried? How did it go? How did you feel? What do you intend to try next, and why?

Do you have a will and, if so, do your heirs know what is in it? Why or why not? Are you comfortable with this situation? What comes next?

Money and your duties to society

In concrete terms, how do you define good citizenship? How does your answer to this question translate into your views on the practice of keeping income off the books?

What does social responsibility mean for you? How does that meaning translate into your own habits and aspirations as to philanthropy? Are you comfortable with the amount of financial giving you do? With how systematically you engage in it?

Wealth and legacy

How do you define wealth? Using that definition, do you view yourself as a wealthy person?

What are the most important values instilled in you in life by a now deceased parent, grandparent, or other close relative or friend? Now, picture someone asking that same question of each of your children after you have passed away. What do you hope would be the answer? What do you think each might answer? Do your answers have any bearing on how you intend to use your money while alive and what portion you aspire to leave to your descendants?

Do you value planning itself?

How do you define planning? Performed correctly, does it restrict you or free you? Do you see it as empowering you to seize on opportunities or depleting that power? Do you see it as lighting up your creativity or extinguishing it?

In life, have your top plans been rigid or flexible?

Is writing down a plan usually a good idea or a bad one, and why?

Think back on your most successful experience with a documented plan. Was it a dead document or a live one?

Is planning just writing stuff down, or is it a process? If a process, at its best, how does such a process work? Where do measurement and accountability fit in?

Do you see any relationship between planning and looking fearlessly at hard facts?

My year-end wish for readers

As we end one calendar cycle and enter another, my wish for you are a deepening of connections: between you and your loved ones, between you and the less fortunate around you, and between your deepest values and your year-end financial planning and conduct.

I wish these things for you, because I know that these connections are what will bring you the deepest peace in 2022.