One of my favorite authors is Annie Dillard. In a book called The Writing Life, she wrote:
“The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring. It is the sensation of a stunt pilot’s turning barrel rolls, or an inchworm’s blind rearing from a stem in search of a route. At its worst, it feels like alligator wrestling, at the level of the sentence.”
I am not a writer, but I can relate to what she describes just in terms of life in general. There are days that feel like I am riding behind a stunt pilot turning barrel rolls. I sometimes wake up looking for the priorities that should define my activity. In that sense I am like the inchworm rearing up and blindly searching. Thankfully, very few days have felt like alligator wrestling.
When I was a child, someone gave me a spinning top as a gift. I spent many enjoyable moments looking at it spinning beside me on my desk. According to Wikipedia, “A spinning top, or simply a top, is a toy with a squat body and a sharp point at the bottom, designed to be spun on its vertical axis, balancing on the tip due to the gyroscopic effect.”1
“Gyroscopic what?” Whenever the top slowed down, it wobbled, and eventually fell over. The primary force working against it was gravity. Gravity, however, operates as a force primarily on the vertical plane. It pulls down, not over. Gravity acted down through the top’s center.
A spinning top’s stability in an upright position depends on the centripetal force exceeding the pull of gravity. I was the one who gave the top its centripetal force by spinning it with my fingers. The greater the force my fingers exerted, the longer it would spin.
Point: The two things we can count on in this spinning life:
- Things slow down
- Things fall down
A Plan to Spot
The average walking speed of a healthy adult is three to four miles per hour (MPH), depending on age, fitness level, terrain, and other factors. Assume I am in better shape than most (questionable) and could walk four MPH. If I walked directly east, I would actually be going backward at a rate of 803 MPH. Why? Because in Cincinnati, OH, where I sit right now, I am at 39.1031° N latitude. At this latitude the earth is spinning around its axis at 807.3644 MPH. I may feel like I am making progress relative to what is around me, but that masks the truth.
Similarly, someone who has money set aside in a savings account earning 3.0 percent, when inflation is 2.5 percent and the applicable Federal tax rate is 18 percent, is actually standing still.
To gauge any kind of financial progress accurately, one needs to have a broad perspective and reliable measuring tools.
As an Independent Financial Professional (IFP), you may be unaware of the importance that a financial plan offers for giving your clients such much needed perspective.
Question: Have you ever seen a ballerina spin on her toes?
Maybe you have seen that her head and body are spinning seemingly separately. When a ballerina spins, she executes a dancing technique called “spotting.” “Spotting is performed by rotating the body and head at different rates. While the body rotates smoothly at a relatively constant speed, the head periodically rotates much faster and then stops, so as to fix the dancer’s gaze on a single location (the spotting point, or simply the spot).”2
For clients, life is a daily invitation to spin. Work, family, home, entertainment, volunteering, and hobbies make the pace of simple day-to-day life a blurred result from the feeling of spinning.
Point: What all clients really need in order to maintain their financial well-being and money-sense while spinning through life is a fixed point to look at and keep in focus. A financial plan to your client is the economic equivalent of a ballerina’s “spotting point.”
Not Monuments, but Footprints
Have you ever had a client who sought, and worked hard to develop, a financial plan, only to then place it in a cabinet or desk drawer never to be seen again? To clients like this, a financial plan is a monument.
In the Old Testament Book of Psalms, there is a portion called the Songs of Ascent. These 15 Psalms (120-134) were likely sung by Jewish people making the pilgrimage “up” to Jerusalem. (That city is topographically at a higher elevation than most inhabited places in Palestine; therefore, walking from any direction toward the city is actually a trip uphill.)
American author William Faulkner once described these 15 Psalms of Ascent this way:
“They are not monuments, but footprints. A monument only says, ‘At least I got this far,’ while a footprint says, ‘This is where I was when I moved again.’”3
Point: As an IFP concerned that your clients keep themselves always moving forward and “up,” you need to disabuse them of the notion that their financial plan is, in any way, a monument. Rather, a financial plan is a spotting point, a means of measuring both the direction and velocity of their financial footsteps.
Control and Security
My wife and I found a friend and an inspiration in our Tennessee pastor named Scott Sparks. Sadly, this wonderful man passed away in February, 2018. His surviving wife bravely recorded her journey of grief in Social Media posts, one each succeeding Saturday morning. One morning she wrote this:“I don’t know why I associate control with security.”4
Honestly, one of the most important things you do as an IFP is to dispel your clients the notion that they can control their financial lives to the extent that they will necessarily be secure.
People with solid financial plans faced the devastation of Monday, October 19, 1987, known as “Black Monday.” On that date, the DJIA fell 508 points (22.6 percent).
Similarly, all the planning in the world could not have foreseen, nor entirely prepared, clients from the Great Recession of 2008-9.
Raging inflation and high interest rates are beyond your clients’ control and can threaten their financial security. With your wise counsel, they can however control the damage and plan the next steps.
Point: A financial plan does not protect against financial crises, but rather, prepares the paths leading away from, and out of, the devastation. The control in a financial plan is all about the response.
Where?
“Probably the most well-known of the paintings of Gaugin, the French impressionist painter, is hanging in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. On the upper left corner of the canvas he wrote in French: ‘Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?’”5
As an IFP you are a tour guide and a travel advisor. You help clients move from and to. While the three questions Gaugin left in his painting are essentially metaphysical and philosophical, they are equally important in financial terms.
A financial plan needs to be regularly updated. The client’s footprints are recorded. The plan provides a spotting point to see just how far away from center the client’s finances have moved.
Clients on the way to financial freedom and independence often forget where they came from. It is your role as IFP to help them celebrate their achievements, keep them humble and grounded, and remember that although they have risen above subsistence living, other people have not.
Equally true, clients lose track of where they are heading. You are responsible for reminding them of the goals behind the financial disciplines they are practicing. With your help, clients maintain their best habits. They keep their eyes on the prize.
Lastly, clients get confused as to who and what is important to them, what they want to leave as a legacy, and what good they can accomplish through the assets they have accumulated. How they use their money says a lot about who they are.
Summary
We live in a world where things slow down, and then fall down.
I hold IFPs in high esteem. They are sometimes unsung heroes. Behind many successful people is an IFP who kept the financial plan as a spotting point, refused to let the clients view the plan as a monument, and measured both the direction and velocity of the client’s footsteps.
Because of you, your clients remember where they have come from and where they are going. With your help, they become better human beings and make a greater contribution to the world by the way they steward what they have.
Penny Sparks wrote something very profound:
“God is not careless or random with my days. He will equip me for anything if I let Him. I have as much of a God as I have faith to receive.”6
As an IFP, think of yourself as the someone who can help clients avoid acting randomly with what they have been given to steward, as a clarion voice that helps them prepare for the future, and the cheerleader helping them stretch what they believe to be possible.
Footnotes:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_top.
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotting_(dance_technique).
- William Faulkner, quoted in Sam di Bonaventura’s program notes to Elie Siegmeister’s Symphony no. 5, Baltimore Symphony Concert, May 5, 1977.
- “My Saturday Morning Posts,” Penny Sparks, WestBow Press (September 11, 2019), ISBN-10: 1973670909.
- “Name above All Names,” Page 160, Copyright © 2013 by Alistair Begg and Sinclair B. Ferguson, Published by Crossway,1300 Crescent Street, Wheaton, Illinois 60187, Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4335-3775-2.
- “My Saturday Morning Posts,” Penny Sparks, WestBow Press (September 11, 2019), ISBN-10: 1973670909.
