Exploring Two Tools for Financial Planning

So as I was recently meeting with a client, we were reviewing their Financial Satisfaction Survey as well as their Life Transition Survey. They made the comment that the Financial Satisfaction Survey felt like a scorecard. As we discuss it further he said filling out the survey gave him the opportunity to reflect on the decisions that they had made over the last year and decide whether they got them to where they wanted to be and whether they reflected the things that were important to them.

In today’s video, we’re going to take a quick look at the Financial Satisfaction Survey, the Life Transition Survey, how to complete them, and where we’re going to be using those as part of our financial planning process.

Hi everyone, this is Mark Brinser, I am a financial planner with Stewardship Advisors here in Mount Joy, Pennsylvania. As you saw in the introductory part of the video, today we’re going to be focusing on showing you a little bit of the Financial Satisfaction and the Life Transition Surveys that are now part of our financial planning process.

About two months ago I wrote a blog post that goes into a little bit more of the why behind these two surveys; we will put a link in the description to that blog post so you can go back and get a little bit more details on that.

Financial Satisfaction Survey

First, we are going to take a look at the Financial Satisfaction Survey. So the first thing you’re going to want to do when you click on the link if we sent it to you in an email is come here and enter your name as well as your email address. And then as you look down through there are going to be 20 different questions and it’s going to be asking you how satisfied you are within these different areas. The most important part about this particular survey is 1 through 5 with your initial gut reaction to the question. Obviously, there are no right or wrong answers here to these particular questions; it’s just a way to guide our conversations that we can look at things that you feel like are going well for you right now on and also take a look at the things that maybe aren’t going so well right now and ways that we can improve those.

So for each question you have the option to choose from 1 through 5 with one being not satisfied and 5 being very satisfied. After you’ve answered each one of those you just click through here, if you want to change your answer you just go ahead and click a different option. Once you’re done with all of that you just want to scroll to the bottom and click the submit form. What you’ll get at the top here is a little message that says your submission has been saved so we got a copy of it here at Stewardship Advisors. If you want to come back and look at your answers at some point, you can just copy this link here and paste it back into your browser, or if you want a hard copy can just select the print button, and then you have the hard copy for your records as well.

We do ask – if you have a spouse or significant other that’s going to be meeting with us as well – we do ask that you both complete these separately. So if you got an email with a link to complete the survey, once one person completes it and submit that you can actually go back to that same link in the email, the other person can click on that link and it will bring you to the same form but it’ll be blank so they can begin and fill it out for themselves. But we do want each person to fill one out separately.

Life Transition Survey

So next we are going to take a look at the Life Transition Survey. Just like the Financial Satisfaction Survey, you will want to enter your name here at the top as well as your email address. As you look down through this survey there are going to be 52 different life transitions that you’re going to be asked about. Perhaps most importantly for people, don’t feel like you need to answer each and every one of these transitions. You might only look at this and see one that’s applicable to you, or you might see five that are applicable to you. But the point is not every single one is going to need to be filled in, you just want to check the ones that you’re concerned about or that you think are coming up in the future.

For each transition, you can note whether that is something you are currently experiencing, something that you are anticipating in the short to the medium-term, or something that you’re looking at long-term. As you scroll down they’re grouped into different areas of your life, so there are ones related specifically to work, ones that are specifically related to financial transactions or transitions, ones that are relating to your family, and then lastly related to your legacy.

So once you’re done and you select the different options for each of these again just hit Submit Form, and you will be given a notice at the top here that the form has been saved. If you would like a copy for your records you can either copy the link which then you can just put this in your address bar and come back to the future or if you want a hard copy you can just press the print button as well.

Forms are Crucial Part of Annual Review Meetings

These are going to be something that we are going to be using during all of our review meetings moving forward at least once a year. They will guide our conversations as far as what changes or plans need to be made to your financial plan moving forward.

So as you can see, both of those surveys should be relatively quick to complete but they’re going to give us a lot of information both about how you’re currently feeling with the decisions you’ve been making over the last year but also about the transition that we have that we need to start planning for. That way, you can have confidence that when those transitions come we already know exactly which steps we need to be taking.

We anticipate asking people to complete these once per year or so before one of your review meetings you will be getting these surveys to complete. We’re just really excited about including these as part of our process. We think you’ll find a lot of value in them and making sure that we stay on track to that future that you envision for you and your family. If you have any questions about either one of them, don’t hesitate to reach out to our office.

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