Your Money At Work: November

Community Comments

How Does Your Financial Plan Score?

By Karen E. Stawicki

Most successful people I know have a determined desire to measure their results. We compare our annual business plans to previous years, strive to lower our golf handicaps and enjoy a winning night playing cards with friends.
    Although the wish, or the need, to keep score is a positive attribute, successfully applying this trait to our financial lives requires a fundamental understanding of how money works. The problem is we can choose the wrong scorekeeping system.
    Over the past 24 years, I’ve met with many people who believed they were pursuing a winning financial strategy only to find, upon further study, it was headed toward producing woefully inadequate results. As Stephen Covey so accurately points out in his “Seven Habits” series, you may be actively climbing the ladder, but it’s leaning against the wrong wall.
    Those of us who have started a business have developed a strategy that not only covers how to get into the venture but also, if we’re smart, how to preplan a way to leave the business. Again borrowing from Covey, we “begin with the end in mind.”

Monitoring Growth
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