Why do you do what you do?
What are you hoping to accomplish?
Describe your successful life in the context of how you see your life unfolding.  

What are the skills and resources that you bring to bare in pursuit of the why of your life? Today? Tomorrow? Guaranteed? Potential? Can we enhance your outcome? 

Exploring obstacles and challenges you may face and strategies and products which can mitigate these obstacles and challenges. 

Financial planning is the collection of strategies, products and services that are pulled together so that it can help provide you with continuity and context for how your money is working at moments in time. It can help provide clarity when we put the events of the day in context of a longer term and broader whole. Too often we acquire a collection of products that resemble a junk drawer and there is no coordination, nor is there any collaboration between a variety of stakeholders and your financial wellbeing. Does your Financial Planner ever ask to speak to your general insurance agent? Does your Financial Planner, other than checking to see who the beneficiaries are in the products you have or a will you may have crafted have, ever discussed what that means in terms of financial outcomes, and would a different approach serve you better today as well as your beneficiaries in the future.

Financial planning should also be the glue that holds together the various elements of your plan. If one piece does not live up to the expectations of a future that you envisage for yourself, do you have other pieces of your plan that can provide an element of security or take up the slack for the part of your plan that is underperforming? Nothing ever works in a linear fashion. Jacob Fugger the Rich in 1546 (check date) established that the foundational thinking for his family was to have 25% of your money in bonds, 25% of your money in gold, 25% of your money in real estate and 25% of your money in stocks. Those were the options available to him at that time. The reason he had those 4 classes of assets equal because he expected that in any one year, for one of them to decrease in value.  In his day and age gold became a storehouse for wealth, bonds became a source of consistent income, real estate became a long-term investment that would provide stability, and stocks would be uneven in their growth but provide the greatest return over time. That expectation that one area would decline in value allowed him to look at it not in isolation but look at each of those assets and how they performed as part of a broader whole. For modern day financial planning we have more tools, we have more skills, but this same basic concept applies. Do you have all your eggs in one basket? Do you understand why your portfolio or plan will fluctuate in its performance? Is this a moment to eliminate an investment or is this a normal course of events and we need to understand our investments in context. Good financial planning will put things in context so that you won’t make stupid decisions and get rid of good investments because they are underperforming for a moment in time.