Without forgiveness, there's no future. - Desmond Tutu

Before anyone online reads anything I write, you can be confident that my wife has read it first.  Two weeks ago, her last-minute feedback to “What to Do When You Deserve Better” included a warning to me.  She said it felt a bit like I was scolding my reader.  I insisted that I had struck my intended tone, and published it. After all, I was hoping for a kind of wake-up call for, people still tolerating inferior relationships.  As is often the case, with time I realized that my wife had a point. My four-step process for improvement left out something critical. I ask your forgiveness for that oversight.

Every relationship, even those that should end, had a beginning.  You once believed that your counterpart was a good fit for you, be it in romance, business, or otherwise.  This is why it can be so difficult to move on in a more positive direction. Acknowledging that you should make a change, means acknowledging that you could have made a better choice in the past.  

Rest assured that you are not alone in this.  Everyone has trusted the wrong person at least once in their life.  They chose the wrong spouse, hired the wrong employee, or cast a vote for the wrong candidate.  Many have paid a very steep price for this misplaced trust. Eventually, they move on and almost all wish they had done so sooner.  Once you accept that you have made a completely understandable misstep, only then can you be free to move down a better path forward.

With this in mind, you should take the critical step of forgiving yourself. Consider it “Step 0” in the four-step process for raising your standards and experiencing the quality of relationships that you deserve.

By now, you may be asking “What does any of this have to do with investments or financial planning?”  I would argue that moving past prior decisions, and my tactic for doing so, can be key to success in both.

A disciplined investor has an “exit strategy” for every investment they make.  When you invest money in anything, you have an expectation for how things will go.  For starters, you expect to make money (or why in the world did you choose that investment!?). You should also have an idea of what circumstances would cause you to exit that investment and move on.  Human nature makes this difficult. We don’t want to “take the loss” and often times, we make the situation worse by waiting for things to improve on their own. Beyond that, we may have developed a habit of making excuses for the nonperforming asset, and over time started to believe those excuses ourselves.  When you need to let an investment go, there is one simple question to ask yourself (keep reading).

Now that I’ve discussed the investments themselves, let’s talk about the planning side.  Financial planning is fundamentally about a relationship between a planning professional and a client.  Just like with a stock or bond investment, the client should have clear expectations of what they will experience in the future.  They should also have conditions (breach of trust, poor communication, etc.) that they know would cause them to move on to a better relationship.  If those things should occur, they need to cease making excuses, embrace change and stop waiting for things to “turn around” on their own. Inertia is a powerful force and things generally will not change unless you change them.  This is where you can ask yourself the one simple question I hinted at earlier. Forgive yourself for any prior decisions, forget about the past, and ask yourself this one question: “If I woke up today with no investments and no advisor, would I invest my money the same way it is today?”  If the answer is “no”, then you owe it to yourself to make a change.

“They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.” 

― Andy Warhol