Recently, a friend asked me what my job is.
“Financial planner” is technically correct, but sort of useless. I say useless because he immediately followed up with, “what does that actually mean?”
The first part of my job is helping families figure out what their money is for. The second part is helping to arrange their financial picture in such a way that they have the money they need for the things they want, when they want those things.
If you start with the 401k, the RSU vest, the question of whether to go Roth or pretax, or a “retirement number,” what you end up with is a plan that works on paper and doesn’t serve your life.
Values are the foundation of (good) goals
When we say “figure out what the money is for,” most people reach for goals. Pay off the house. Fund the kids’ college. Retire at 53.
Those are goals, and we’ll get to goals in a minute. But goals come from values.
“I want to retire at 53” is a goal. The value underneath it is usually some version of “I want control over my own time while my body can still do fun stuff” or “I watched my father work until he couldn’t enjoy the retirement he saved for, and I refuse to repeat that.”
Those are very different values, and the plans that come out of them diverge in most of the ways that matter—what they tolerate in a bad market, what they prioritize when goals collide, what they treat as non-negotiable.
Goals change frequently. A job changes, a kid comes, a parent gets sick, and the list gets rewritten. Values (might) move slowly, over decades. Name the values and you can rebuild the goals any time life rearranges itself. Skip them, and every life change feels like a planning reset.
From values to goals
Once you have values, you can set goals.
A goal has three parts: a timeline, an amount, and a reason. The reason is what ties it back to the value.
Most families are running five to eight goals at once. The usual stack: a housing goal, an education goal for one or more kids, career flexibility for one or both of you, a work-optional goal, an aging-parents line item, a lifestyle goal (travel, a second home, a sabbatical), and sometimes a charitable goal. It’s rare for a high-earning family in their thirties or forties to be running fewer than four at the same time.
Goals compete. Part of planning is deciding what loses when they collide, and values are how you make that call without resenting it later.
A plan makes hitting goals more likely
Most of what gets sold as planning is actually optimization: the highest-return portfolio, the lowest-tax withdrawal sequence, the most efficient rebalance, the tightest Roth conversion plan. Optimization is a useful tool. It’s not the job.
The work is reconciliation: taking five to eight competing goals, stacking them against a finite pile of income and savings, running them forward through thirty years of uncertainty, and producing a plan with enough give in it to survive the things you haven’t thought of yet.
A common objection
If you’ve read this far with any impatience, your objection is probably some version of this:
“I’m thirty-eight. I have an RSU vest next month. My kid starts kindergarten in the fall. I don’t have time for a values exercise. Just tell me what to do with the RSUs.”
Fair enough. But…
Without knowing what the money is for, there is no single right answer for the RSUs. There are four or five defensible ones, and the one that’s right for you depends on things that haven’t been named yet.
So the values exercise isn’t a luxury you earn after you solve the mechanics. It’s how you figure out which mechanics to solve in the first place. Skip it, and you will make defensible choices that don’t serve your life. That’s the most common pattern I see in a first conversation with new clients, and it’s the one we’re trying to keep you out of.
Want a better sense of your own values? Go through these six prompts in one evening with your spouse.
Here’s the exercise. It pairs nicely with Italian reds.
What did you inherit from your parents about money?
Not the money. The posture—spoken rules and unspoken ones alike. Did money feel scarce or abundant in the house you grew up in? Was it something you talked about or avoided? Who made the decisions, who worried, who spent, and what got modeled without anyone saying a word about it out loud. Most people’s relationship with money was set before they had a say in it. Examining it gives you a choice.
What disagreements about money keep coming back between you two?
Dig into the the recurring ones. Spending on kids’ activities. Giving to family. Eating out. Car choices. Vacation tier. If the same argument has happened three times, there’s a values conflict underneath that neither of you has surfaced. A plan has to reconcile that.
What’s keeping you up at 2 a.m.?
Job loss? A parent moving in? A kid who needs more than you know how to give them? A health thing. A marriage thing. Whatever it is, any plan that doesn’t acknowledge it is going to meet it unprepared.
If you had everything you needed for the rest of your life, starting tomorrow—what actually changes?
Not “I quit my job and move to Portugal.” Be more specific. What does a Tuesday look like? Do you still work, and what kind, and how much? Do you see your parents more, your kids more, your friends more? Do you cook differently, volunteer, travel, read? Most people answer this and find that a third of what they thought they needed money for is already available to them, and the other two thirds are more concrete than they used to feel.
What do you want your kids to say about you when they’re grown?
This prompt pushes the horizon out 30 years and asks what you want to be true of you by then. It isn’t a money question, strictly. But almost every answer has money implications, because the thing most people say—”I want them to say we were present, that we showed up, that they knew what we cared about”—usually costs time, and time usually costs money somewhere else.
What’s the thing you keep putting off because the money doesn’t feel right yet?
The sabbatical, the career change, the second (or third) kid, the book, the move closer to aging parents, the “we’ll do it when we hit X” thing. Name it. A plan’s job is often to make the thing possible sooner than “when the money feels right”—which, for most high earners, is a moving target that never arrives.
What comes out of that conversation
Two things happen when a couple does this exercise honestly.
A handful of values emerge with more weight than the others. Nobody leaves with an evenly weighted list of fifteen. Two or three move to the front—things like “keep my time while the kids are small,” “carry a margin of safety around my parents’ aging,” or “never be in a position where one of us has to stay in a job we hate to keep the family whole.” Those are the anchors.
What also becomes legible is the difference between the two of you. One of you is organized around security; the other around freedom. One around legacy, the other around experience. That difference is the most important finding in your financial plan—not because one of you is right, but because the plan has to reconcile both.
Nothing in this essay is investment, legal, or tax advice. It’s a general discussion of concepts I find useful in my work and shouldn’t be relied on as a recommendation for your specific situation. Talk to a qualified advisor (ideally one who knows you) before acting on anything here.
