Hello and welcome to Radiant Wealth Planning, a virtual financial planning and investment management firm exclusively for women. I’m Randa Hoffman, owner, and financial planner, and I’m located in sunny Newport Beach, California.

Today’s blog is about figuring out how to identify those mysterious financial goals we always talk about, believe it or not, they could be hard to define. A lot of financial planners know that when they ask a client “what are your financial goals?” that it’s a crappy question, but they don’t know how to help their clients dig deep and think through what is important to them and what a fulfilled life looks like. Not only is this question so vague but clients don’t like being asked it for so many reasons. It could be that they don’t know what life will look like in 20 years and don’t know what to plan for, and so the default answer “I want to retire at 65” is given. As some people are wrecking your brain to come up with an answer, others know that when they meet with an advisor, they’ll be asked this question and that causes stress, so they would prefer to not start the process.

I’m going to share how clients and I do it, and I hope that you do this for yourself as well. If you’re in a relationship do this exercise with your partner because it’s very insightful and will bring awareness if the two of you are on the same page for what you want from life. This is an important conversation to be had, and a good financial planner can help guide the conversation, but it truly needs to occur between the two of you honestly and safely.

When a woman signs up for a Discovery meeting, she gets an email that helps her to start thinking about this before we meet. In the email, there are 3 questions, and I ask that answering them isn’t done in one session.