WE all wish to live lives that matter and count for something. Towards that end, most of us are sufficiently unselfish to harbour a magnanimous streak wide (and deep) enough to imprint upon our psyche an abiding desire to make "a difference" — to leave Earth a better place because we have "lived, moved and had our being" here on this precious life-bearing third rock from the Sun.
Three decades ago, in 1994, I was fortunate enough to be the Malaysian winner of the Citibank Pan-Asia Business Journalism award. It took national winners across Asia and Latin America to Columbia University in Manhattan, New York, for an extended two-week seminar series on economics, politics and global affairs.
I stayed on campus, and walking across the phenomenally beautiful Columbia grounds to and from lectures was an indelibly positive experience.
I recently learned about the work of the late American author Harold S. Kushner, who studied in Columbia in the 1950s. In his book Living a Life that Matters: Resolving the Conflict between Conscience and Success, Kushner wrote: "One man alone can't defeat the forces of evil, but many good people coming together can."
As our world is riven with pain and heartache, blatant racism and genocidal wars, injustice and more evil than can be contained in a fat daily newspaper, there is still hope for Earth because so many of us want to make things better for others around us.
It might interest you, therefore, to learn that heeding the dictates of financial planning to benefit our loved ones and ourselves can also help us improve our broader environment and wider ecosystem.
Rather helpfully, my favourite definition of financial planning can point each of us in the direction of altruism, IF we are already wired to be magnanimous.
Here it is, sans frills, crystally clear and superbly helpful: "Financial planning is the process of meeting your life goals through the proper management of your finances."
FINANCIAL GOALS
Think first about your self-centred, vitally important-to-you, major financial goals, such as personal retirement and kids' tertiary education funding. Portable leadership and financial disciplines, such as self-sacrifice, delayed gratification and dynamic goal recalibration, are required for us to gain steady long-term traction towards hitting those conventional funding targets.
As much as we all want to be loved unconditionally, the reality is that in human relationships, the principle of fair exchange often — though admittedly not always — plays a prominent role. It is sometimes described as a "you-scratch-my-back-and-I'll-scratch-yours" quid pro quo arrangement.
Philosopher and international speaker Dr John Demartini explains it this way: "Our self-worth impacts what we allow ourselves to be, to do and to have in life. This plays a vital role in fair exchange of services or goods."
So, managing our money well enough to not spend all of it all the time but to save some, and later invest most of that accumulating nest egg beyond our liquidity needs, and thus inevitably grow our stash-of-cash enough to meet personal economic goals for loved ones and ourselves, is how we responsibly make ourselves RELEVANT to our irreplaceable families.
Such journeys often take decades and invariably harness our hard-won abilities to make personal sacrifices, exercise delayed gratification and initiate mid-course corrections to the respective wealth accumulation trajectories of our various goals.
Thankfully, those same three disciplines can also be harnessed to attain external societal goals, such as funding foundations and charities, and extending generosity to those beyond our immediate clan.
PATTERN OF SUCCESS
When we take that key second step, our lives generate a sheen of CONSEQUENCE, which becomes obvious to observers. A pleasant side effect of that is an incremental ratcheting up of social status, which, frankly, for our own edification, should never be the main reason for our extrinsic generosity but only a natural, unsought-after result. Our primary goal for taking step two is to help others. It was the late Mother Teresa who said, "Not all of us can do great things, but we can do small things with great love."
Over time, attaining one goal after another, big or small, sets us up for a pattern of success. As different collections of small wins pile up one on top of another, again and again, external observers will equate those sequential (and consequential) victories to a life of abiding SIGNIFICANCE.
Author John C. Maxwell wrote, "To be significant, all you have to do is make a difference with others wherever you are, with whatever you have, day by day."
So, let us take a step back and think about how a small personally focused accomplishment like getting our financial house in order by heeding the three main dictates (or dimensions) of financial planning — namely, wealth protection, wealth accumulation and wealth distribution — for decades at a stretch can yield a rich harvest of relevance, consequence and significance, or RCS in short.
It seems to me any pertinent cost-benefit-analysis will indicate that bringing in a bountiful RCS harvest translates into outstanding personal success across a lifetime that does indeed leave Earth a better place.
My earnest advice to you: Go for it.
© 2024 Rajen Devadason
Rajen Devadason, CFP, is a securities commission-licensed Financial Planner, professional speaker and author. Read his free articles at www.FreeCoolArticles.com; he may be connected with on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/rajendevadason, or via rajen@RajenDevadason.com. You may also follow him on Twitter @Rajen Devadason and on YouTube (Rajen Devadason).