We Live In a Dynamic World. Plans Must Be Flexible!

You live in a dynamic, and not a static world!
Therefore, it is vital that you recognize that any plan to achieve financial health will require amendments, updates, and new strategies to maintain viability.  Optimum Financial Health is the Goal.  What can happen?

As an illustration:  There was a period of time in our recent history that seemed to indicate that equities would always go up, and average 12-20% returns per year.  As a matter of fact, some people believed they could achieve these rates in less than a year.  This "irrational exuberance" as it came to be described, found people making all manner of decisions based on a rather short lived phenomena.  To this end, people took equity out of their homes and bet it on risky and speculative stock strategies.  When the markets collapsed in the year following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, entire life savings were wiped out, and with it, many good families home equities.

 Future articles in this series will speak to wise investment guidelines as well as asset protection measures that are wise to understand and employ.  But that is not the point of this caution.

 Your plans for your future must, of necessity be amended.  Your circumstances will change.  The environment within which you make your decisions may change.  Our economy may change.  The only non-variable about the future is the fact of change.  Change will occur.  Sometimes it will bless you and other times it will penalize you, but change will occur.

 Therefore, a person desiring financial health makes the following assumptions:

    You will get a cold or virus.  Some plan you make will not turn out as you hoped.  Some mutual fund you buy will have a down quarter or down year.  Some car you buy will experience mechanical challenges.

    You will suffer unexpected accidents.  Accidents happen to someone.  They can happen to you.  You have a one in four chance of experiencing a short term incapacitation.  You have a one in one chance of eventually dying.

     You will meet with setbacks, reverses, and disappointments.  If you live, you will face "tribulation".  You are not immune, even if you are a person of faith.  The strongest company of today could not even exist in twenty years, and with its demise, merger or disappearance, your pension and benefits.

     You will experience something in your family that will be unexpected, and costly.  It doesn't have to be a bad experience, but it will be an experience.  And it will demand a response.

     You may just change your mind about what you want to be when you grow up, after you are fully grown up.  It happens.

     And, last, but certainly not least, that person that you assumed you would absolutely be married to for your entire life, may determine at some point in the future that you are not the perfect soul mate you believe yourself to be.  Not trying to be depressing, anti-marriage, or negative, but just exploring the possibility of possibilities.  A prudent plan calls for keeping  our primary relationships intact.

     Therefore, if your goal is optimum financial health, realize that it is a valuable goal within a subset of more important goals.  I.e.  the prospering of your relationship with Christ, His Body, the Church,  and your relationships with your family.

Next Article:  Practical Strategies to Prosper and Invest for Optimum Financial Health.

Adapted from I Must Prosper Tutorial
Donald Clark, Chrysalis Consulting, Inc.

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