THE QUALITY OF LIFE ENHANCER™ WORKSHEET

What’s More Important in Life Than Money?

Excerpt from the book,
VALUES-BASED FINANCIAL PLANNING™
The Art of Creating an Inspiring Financial Strategy.
- by Bill Bachrach

CHAPTER 5
Know Yourself: Deciding Whether or Not You Need Help
Pages 81-86 The exercise you’re about to do is designed to focus you on what’s most important in your life, and help you further discern what activities will contribute the most to your quality of life. “The Quality of Life Enhancer™ Worksheet” is based on two principles:

1. The more you can align your behavior with your core values (what’s most important to you), the happier, more satisfied, and fulfilled you’ll be; and
2. The more you delegate what’s less important, the more time you have for what’s more important.

These principles follow two basic facts of life:

1. There are only 168 hours in a week, no matter your age, how much money you make, what you’ve invested, how attractive you are, or how much information you can access on the Internet. No Exemptions. Your quality of life is a function of how you choose to spend that time.
2. Some things cannot be delegated, and some things can. Question: Is delegation a privilege reserved for the elite? Answer: Hardly! Did you or your friends ever receive an allowance for doing chores around the house? That’s “parental delegation.” I learned the power of delegation from my parents, who were not wealthy or elite. Did you notice your dad never paid you to go fishing or to play golf for him? Everyone can learn to delegate to one degree or another.

The Quality of Life Enhancer™ is designed to help you keep financial management in perspective. In the example you see six categories down the left side of the grid. Feel free to customize these for yourself they’re not set in stone. Yet I’ve chosen them because in workshops on this subject, I’ve discovered that people can usually agree that these six are more important than money. The rest of the grid is pretty self-explanatory.

Roy Disney once said, “When your values are clear, your decisions are easy.” I’d have to add that when your values are clear and you know what you need to do to experience them – and you realize there are only a finite number of hours in a day – the decision to delegate what you can is easy. Nobody wastes a life days, weeks, months, or years at a time. It’s fifteen minutes here. a half-hour there. a few hours occasionally. that are easily wasted. I strongly encourage you to consider delegating what you can and focusing your time and energy on what’s important to you. Maybe you can find time for some of the activities you include on your Quality of Life Enhancer™ Worksheet by delegating your financial affairs.

To complete your own worksheet, either using the same “Life Qualities” as I’ve provided or substituting your own list, fill in the left column first. Then check yes or no under the “Delegatable?” column, determine how many hours a week you’d like to spend on these qualities, and choose a few activities you’d do. So often we make choices about how we’ll spend our time unconsciously, and this worksheet is designed to help you make conscious choices.

Author Wayne Dyer is famous for writing about his work with people with terminal illnesses. Perhaps his most quotable remark has been that none of those people, confronted with their final days, said they wished they’d spent more time in the office. It’s hard to imagine that they would have said they wished they’d spent more time reading financial magazines, surfing financial Web sites, and checking their stock performance, either.

What about you? Dyer’s point was that if you wouldn’t choose to squander your last week, why would you throw away any of your time? Financial wisdom could be defined as being able to distinguish between what the media, financial companies, and economic information sources try to convince us is absolutely critical from what actually contributes to having a great life.

Here are some things to consider:

• Do you know what a P/E ratio is but not an HDL/LDL ratio?
• Do you know many stars your mutual fund has, but have no idea about your body fat percentage?
• Are you more likely to read Money magazine this week than the Bible, Koran, or some other great text?
• Will you spend more time this week watching financial shows on TV than meditating or praying?
• Did you using more proxy cards for your stock and mutual funds than birthday cards for your friends and family?
• Will you spend more time connected to the Internet than to your friends, children spouse, or parents?
• Do you check your investments daily but not floss daily? (I know that seems silly, but I recently read that if you floss every day, you can add 6.5 years to your life.)

Since we don’t know what we don’t know, it’s possible that you’re not even aware of how much better life would be with a shift in how you spend your time. If there’s one thing I absolutely want to get across to you in this chapter, it is that if spending time on your finances is drawing you away from what’s really important, seek help. In the next few chapters you will learn how to discern the difference between legitimate financial advisors and those who are just product salespeople. So don’t allow any uncertainty you may have about where or how to find an advisor get in the way of a healthy assessment of whether you ought to seek one.

What’s next?

Look again at your Financial Road Map®. If it’s still blank, you probably need some help. If your Financial Road Map® is complete you may want help creating and implementing a strategy. If you’ve decided you are a Do-it-yourselfer, you must begin educating yourself. Start by reviewing the Web site summarized in the sidebar on pages 66-69 to get a complete picture of all the subjects you need to master. Then I suggest you begin to methodically check each of them off your list. Attend seminars, read books, amass a list of reliable online sources. Basically, it’s off to school for you to become a truly competent Do-it-yourselfer.

If, on the other hand, you are a Collaborator or Delegator, you have a different kind of research to conduct. It will be less time consuming by far, but no less important. You must find for yourself a Trusted Advisor.

NOTE: Values-Based Financial Planning™, Financial Road Map®, Quality of Life Enhancer™ Worksheet, and Trusted Advisor™ are trademarks, service marks and or copyrights of Bill Bachrach and or Bachrach and Associates, Inc.