I’ve been very lucky to make great friends throughout my life. College teammates, professional colleagues, and neighbors to name a few. This past weekend I went on a golf trip with five of my best friends dating back to grade school and high school. We’ve been getting together in some capacity for 22 straight years now. We golf, tell the same old stories, catch up on family and career updates, debate politics and sports and generally just have fun. Our golf outings have been turned into semi-serious competitions, complete with traditions mimicking The Masters, uniforms, trophies, recorded previews, and of course plenty of monetary incentive to perform well. In recent years, more time has been spent discussing parenting techniques, and the challenges of home ownership than exchanging stories about a crazy day at the racetrack, or night out on the town. It’s funny how things change. My weekend away with friends was a great reminder to me of why we do what we do for our clients.
If you visit our website, you’ll see that each TAAG team member has a short blurb about The Good Life. Obviously, we all have a different idea of what “The Good Life” is and that’s the point. The good life is as unique a concept as we are as individuals. Whether your good life involves time with family and friends, traveling the world, or supporting an important cause, we view it as our role to help clients define their good life and then live it out.
If you work with us, you’ve probably been through one of our Discovery Meetings. These meetings are more like an in-depth personal interview than a financial planning meeting. This is often one of our first meetings, early on in a relationship. We take the opportunity to get to know our clients and find out what is important to them. We ask about their values, family, careers, vacations, and interests. This process helps our clients to define their goals and it helps us plan for them to achieve the goals. The Discovery process is the foundation of everything that we do at TAAG. Investment returns, tax rates and the latest legislation are meaningless if we don’t know what we are ultimately planning for.
It’s our hope that by going through this process our clients will someday be able to spend most of their time on what’s really important to them. If we can put a plan in place so that they can reach some sort of financial freedom and be gifted the peace of mind that comes with that – then they can live The Good Life. It’s truly rewarding to have a client come in and share a story with us about living their good life. When that happens, we know we are succeeding in our role as advisors and planners.
Despite my results on the golf course – I got to live a little bit of my good life this past weekend spending time with some great friends. The time away also allowed me to appreciate my good life at home with my young kids and wife a little more. I hope that everyone who might read this can capture their good life in the short-term and build a plan to keep it going for the long-term.