Honoring Math Storytelling Day
September 25th is Math Storytelling Day, and it started me thinking about the reactions when people hear I am a financial advisor. After they ask me for a hot stock tip (no, I don’t have one) they often comment that I must really like math. And I hate to admit it, but I’ve never been a huge fan. It is an integral part of our daily activities, but not like most people expect. Financial planning does require math skills but applied differently than you might expect… let me tell you a story.
I love the idea of math storytelling. If you think back to your classroom days (some of us need to look a bit further back than others, I don’t recommend doing the math here) mathematics always made more sense when we could apply those equations to real life. Understanding the most efficient way to cut a cake taught me fractions. Understanding how tall a tree is by looking at the shadow taught me geometry. For financial planners, the everyday numbers in your life tell us a story.
I’ve never felt like the term “financial plan” fully explains all we do with clients. It implies, just like a math equation, that there is one answer. I tend to think of it more as a “financial roadmap.” We provide an understanding of the decision points on your financial journey, and show you the impact of choices you make at those crossroads. This gives you the tools to move forward with a better understanding of your options. This roadmap is created through a lot of math (long live financial planning software!) and an understanding of who you are as an individual.
For example, a new client may come to Christopher Steet with the simple question, “do I have enough saved to retire?" In response, we gather all of the important numbers of their financial lives such as retirement accounts balances, pension, social security, expenses, and mortgages… so many numbers swirl around our lives in a never-ending flow. Then we take into consideration what is important to them: funding education for children or grandchildren, buying a home, travel, or giving to charity for example. We also consider what their final goals look like: do they want to leave an inheritance, fund charities, slide into home base with as little left in their accounts as possible? All these pieces need to be taken into consideration for the “math” to work.
It's our job as financial planners to look at the numbers, and then apply the goals, fears, and final wishes to those numbers like some would apply multiplication or division in an algebraic equation. The final results create a picture that answers the question “do I have enough to live the way I want to?” in a manner that is so far beyond a single solution to an equation. I promise you that a lot of math goes into this picture, but at the end of the day… or the end of our meeting, you will see that what we bring to the table is so much more than numbers. We offer you a choose-your-own-adventure story that gives you options and choices. We show you how to create your “happily ever after” and avoid some of the wolves hiding along the road ahead. And seeing the numbers that make up your life today projected forward into a future retirement picture, well, we hope that tells a story you can rest your head on for a good night’s sleep.
