Imagine you get a call one evening with some bittersweet news: You now have unlimited financial resources—but you only have seven healthy years left to live.
What would you change?
How would you spend your time? Who would you spend it with? What would you do more often? What would you stop doing altogether?
Those questions have a way of bringing life into focus, which is why they’re at the center of our planning process.
A purpose-driven planning process
We believe most people expect a financial planning relationship to begin with bank statements, account balances, and investment returns.
But that’s not where we start.
We’ve built our financial planning process around three pillars of financial independence: Vision, Perspective, and Direction. The first meeting—our Vision Meeting—helps you define what financial independence means to you. Only then does it make sense to talk about how to get there.
Defining Financial Independence
We believe that too often financial planning starts with numbers and hopes those numbers eventually lead to a fulfilling life. We think it should work the other way around—first, define the life you want. Then build the financial plan that supports it. That’s why our Vision Meeting is intentionally light on math.
During this first step in our process, we don’t talk about asset allocation or investment performance. Instead, we focus on the people, experiences, and values that give those numbers a mission. This is where we ask what we call the 7-Year Question:
If you had unlimited financial resources but only seven healthy years left to live, what would you do?
Unlimited money might seem unrealistic—but that’s the point.
For a few minutes, it removes the financial filters people instinctively put on their dreams. There’s no need to decide whether something is affordable or practical. We simply want to understand what matters to someone before we start talking about what’s financially possible.
And the answers are often less extravagant than you might expect.
Sure, some people imagine a yacht or a private jet. But more often, the conversation centers around people and experiences.
Clients talk about spending more time with their children or grandchildren. Some want to outsource tasks that drain their time (goodbye, yard work). Others want to travel while they’re healthy enough to enjoy it. They want to volunteer, mentor someone, pursue meaningful work, or simply slow down enough to be present with the people they love.
Others realize something unexpected—they’d keep working. Not because they need the paycheck, but because they genuinely enjoy what they do. They like solving problems, serving people, or simply having a routine and a reason to get up every morning.
The goal isn’t to create a fantasy. It’s to uncover priorities and define what financial independence means to you.
Connecting the Dots
Many people come to us convinced they need a certain amount of money before they can retire—often $2 million or $3 million. But when we ask how they arrived at that number, many of them don’t know. Maybe another advisor mentioned it years ago, maybe they read it online, or maybe they heard it from a friend. Somewhere along the way, that number became the goal without anyone stopping to ask what it was supposed to accomplish and how.
So, we ask different questions: What’s the latest age you’d want to be financially independent? How much after-tax monthly income would allow you to live comfortably and do the things you just described?
Those questions move the conversation away from arbitrary milestones and toward meaningful goals. And in many cases, clients discover their dreams of financial independence aren’t as far out of reach as they assumed.
Reimagining your Legacy
When people hear the word legacy, they often think about what will happen after they’re gone. But a legacy can be something you experience while you’re still here.
It might mean taking your children or grandchildren on a trip they’ll never forget. It might mean supporting a charity while you can see the impact of your generosity. Or it might mean helping family members at a point in their lives when that support will make the biggest difference.
To frame that conversation, we introduce another hypothetical.
Imagine all your personal financial needs have already been met. Then you learn a long-lost uncle left you $5 million in a trust. The only catch is, you can’t spend it on yourself. It has to benefit other people or organizations.
Who would you give it to? How much would they receive? And (this is where we often see a paradigm shift) when would you want them to receive it?
Those answers often reveal just as much about someone’s priorities as the 7-Year Question.
From there, the conversation naturally turns to estate planning. Do your current documents reflect the intentions you just described? If not, it may be time to revisit them with an estate planning attorney.
Why We Start Here
By the end of the Vision Meeting, we haven’t built a financial plan, but we’ve done something just as important. We’ve established what the plan is meant to accomplish.
Only then do we gather the financial details, evaluate where someone stands today, and begin exploring the strategies that can help them move toward the life they’ve described.
We believe that a financial plan shouldn’t just tell you whether you can afford to leave your job one day. It should help you define what you want your life to look like and help you make purposeful decisions that support that vision.
If you’d like to discuss your Vision with us, we’d love to connect with you. Every relationship begins with a quick introductory call, which you can schedule here.
Disclosure:
LCW Services, LLC (“Altura Wealth Advisors”) is a registered investment advisor. Advisory services are only offered to clients or prospective clients where Altura Wealth Advisors and its representatives are properly licensed or exempt from licensure.
The information provided is for educational and informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice and it should not be relied on as such. It should not be considered a solicitation to buy or an offer to sell a security. It does not take into account any investor’s particular investment objectives, strategies, tax status or investment horizon. You should consult your attorney or tax advisor.