COUPLES FINANCIAL PL ANNING & COACHING, L LC

Control The Controllable —

Ignore Everything Else

Objectives Inside this workbook:

 Explore why fo-
cusing on the con-
The motto of Couples Financial Planning & Coaching,
trollable is so vital LLC is "Control The Controllable - Ignore Everything Contact Informa- 2

Else." We have chosen this as our motto because it truly tion

 Review what is
controllable and captures what we believe, and what our process is de- What Do We 3

what is not signed to help you achieve. Mean

 Increase financial The High Probabil- 3
control We work hard to not spend time worrying about factors ity Path
 Create a long- outside our control and we work hard to help you es-
What To Ignore 4
term plan to re- cape those uncontrollable factors as well. It is our strong
main focused on belief that the best path to improved financial well-being
the controllable is to work on what we can control in our lives. What Is Controlla- 5
ble?
In this short E-Course, we will explore why we believe
Decision-Making 6
so strongly in our motto, we will provide some exercises
Under The Influ-
to help you focus on and increase your financial control,
ence Of Emotions
and we will provide tips for staying on track for the long-
4 Budgeting Steps 7
term. To Take Today
We hope you find this E-Course helpful and hope it sets The Power Of 8
you on a path to increased financial well-being. Please feel Cash
free to contact us if you are interested in learning more Convenience Is Bad 8
about the services we offer at Couples Financial Planning
Staying On Track 9
& Coaching, LLC. We offer a free 30 minute consultation
to find out if our services are right for you!

Control The Controllable—Ignore Everything Else

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Control The Controllable —Ignore Everything Else

Notes

Contact Information:
Phone 920-358-0150
Fax 920-967-0454
Email
contact@couplesfinancialplanning.com
Web www.couplesfinancialplanning.com

Use this page to

write down any
observations or
notes that come
to you while
reading this E-
Course.

Control The Controllable—Ignore Everything Else

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Control The Controllable—Ignore Everything Else

What Do We Mean?
Historically financial advice has focused on several factors that are not inside an individual’s control. A tremen-
dous amount of time, money & other resources were consumed trying to gain some control of these factors.
Unfortunately, since they are not controllable, ultimately little progress was made in improving the financial
well-being of individuals.

We believe there are certain factors that are controllable in your financial life and other factors that are en-
tirely out of your control. Focusing on the controllable factors can have a profound, positive impact on your
financial well-being and your life. Spending time worrying about the uncontrollable leads to frustration and little
positive impact. “This path will
help you reach
There have been individuals who have been successful trying to control the uncontrollable. It is our belief that
these individuals were not able to do so out of any significant talent or skill, but were simply the lucky ones. your financial
There are so many people involved in trying to time the stock market that eventually some individual will be and life goals, will
correct. It is a matter of statistics. Some people are lucky and never have an emergency in their lives, therefore
never need an emergency fund. let you live
freely…”

The High Probability Path

While there certainly are individuals who get the uncontrollable correct and are publicly lauded for their
prowess, these people are the exception. They have won by taking a low probability choice. Warren Buffet has
picked incredibly good investments and done very well. But for every one Buffett, there are thousands (if not
millions) of stock pickers who have done tremendously poorly. They also selected the low probability path.

Your financial well-being is better served by selecting the high probability path when making financial decisions.
This path involves focusing on the controllable and recognizing what is uncontrollable. This path is not exciting,
does not lead to overnight wealth, and is not talked about by your neighbor with the great investments nor
reported by the financial media. This path will help you reach your financial and life goals, will let you live freely
without spending so much time worrying about money, and will allow you to be in control.

Discovery Question
Describe a situation when you have made a financial decision where you were fully in control.

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Control The Controllable —Ignore Everything Else

What To Ignore
The list below contains several financial factors individuals often spend a lot of effort and time trying to con-
trol, but are actually uncontrollable. These are items to ignore when deciding what try to control when making
financial decisions.

 Your money history—during your entire life you have learned financial lessons; from parents, teachers,
friends and others. Some lessons likely served you well, others not so well.
The direction the
stock markets move  How others spend their money—we can’t control how friends and neighbors spend money and trying to
is something entirely keep up with their spending is a certain path to financial difficulty
out of our control.
 Investment performance—nobody has control of the stock and bond markets and nobody has the ability
to predict the future

 Emergencies (medical bills, job layoffs, disability, etc…)— emergencies out of your control will strike and
they could cost you a lot of money

 Emotions— our initial emotional responses to financial forces are not controllable and can often lead us
Trying to to make irrational choices focused on the short-term
influence the
 Legislative and political forces—while voting and contacting our politicians provides a small degree of
uncontrollable control, there is little we can do to forecast the impact legislation will have on our finances
often leads to
making decisions
which have a low
probability of
success.

Discovery Questions
Which of the items listed above have you witnessed others experiencing? How do you think this affected their
finances?

As you read this list, did you see yourself in any of the above items?

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Control The Controllable—Ignore Everything Else

What is controllable?
We have created a list of some high-impact financial factors that are controllable and a short description of
each below:

 Discovering and exploring your life goals— understanding what drives you and what will allow you to live
a life fulfilled gives you direction when making financial decisions

 Understanding how you use your money— a well-designed budget that accounts for your fixed expenses,
variable expenses and goals can provide you tremendous financial control

 Cash reserves & emergency fund— you can control having cash available when the unexpected and un-
controllable occurs
“...a well-designed
 Understanding how you make financial decisions— once you’ve learned how you make decisions, you can budget that
create systems and barriers designed to allow you to improve your decision-making accounts for your
 Taxes—while there is no avoiding paying taxes, there is a great deal you can do with minimal effort to fixed expenses,
control your tax burden variable expenses
 Investments—investment performance is not in your control, but the fees you pay on your investments,
and goals can
the risk you accept, and the impact of taxes are controllable provide you
tremendous
 Risks—certain emergencies and crises cannot be managed with cash alone. Insurance can provide you
some control to help overcome these events.
financial control.”

 The impact of emotions on our decisions-making—while we cannot control our emotional responses, we
can gain some control of how we react to those emotions and the decisions they influence

Discovery Questions Emergencies will

happen. Having an
How many of items within your control have you thought about working on?
emergency fund is
critical to remain in
control when they
Select three of the above controllable items that you find most compelling and make a commitment to learn do.
more about them.

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Control The Controllable —Ignore Everything Else

Decision-Making Under The Influence (Of Emotions)

When strong emotions strike, our decision-making process is severely impacted and we often make irrational
choices. Our brains no longer consider long-term consequences and instead focus on a fight-or-flight response
which only considers immediate impact. This short-term thinking serves us well when faced with a potential
automobile accident or other emergency requiring quick thinking, but it does not serve us well in financial mat-
ters. Unfortunately, we often make financial decisions when in an emotional state. We make investment deci-
sions under the influence of fear when the stock market has dropped. We make purchasing decisions when we
have become very excited about a new product presented in well-done advertisement. The examples go on
and on.
Emotions such as
fear impact the way The list below contains strategies to help improve financial decision making when under the influence of emo-
we make financial tions. The goal of these strategies is to buy yourself a bit of time to allow the emotions to cool down and to
decisions. reengage your long-term thinking process.

 Before making a decisions, step back and answer the following questions either out loud to another per-
son or in writing:

 Does this decision need to be made now?

 What are the long-term consequences of this decision?

 What do I hope to achieve with this decision?

 Take a deep breath, relax and wait 24 hours to make the decision

 Take a trusted friend out for coffee to discuss the decision

 Make access to your money difficult to give yourself time to consider your decision while accessing funds

 Eliminate your credit cards or make them inaccessible by placing them in a locked container or sealed
envelope

It is critical to remember that we do not make our best long-term decisions while influenced by emotions. The
above suggestions can provide tools to help you regain your long-term focus. You should, however, figure out
strategies that work best for you to be able to slow down your decision-making when struck by strong emo-
tions.

Discovery Questions
Do you currently have any ways in which you control your use of your money?

Can you recall a time you made a good financial decision following strong emotions? What made that possi-
ble?

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Control The Controllable—Ignore Everything Else

4 Budgeting Steps To Take Today

Step 1) This evening, take out a sheet of paper and write down what your perfect life looks like.

Where would you live? What would you be doing in this life? What things would you have?

Do this quickly. Write down what comes to your head and don't censor your thoughts. Get them ON PAPER
before they slip away and before you have time to reconsider the thought. Allow yourself to dream, to re-
member goals and ambitions you've had and wanted to fulfill.

Write down what your life would look like for you to feel you had truly lived as you lay on your deathbed. This action plan will
help you begin to
put together a
Step 2) Create a budget based on how you currently use your money. budget designed to
provide you control
Review your checkbook, credit card statements and bank accounts to estimate your monthly flows of money.
If you use cash, track your expenses in for a few months to estimate what you spend. of how you spend
your money
Then use whatever tool works best for you. There is no budgeting tool that works for everyone. You can use
pencil and paper, or create a spreadsheet. You can purchase software or use an online program. The impor-
tant thing is that the tool works for you.

Put down a good estimate of all your expenses, and then don't look at the budget again. Let it sit there. You've
likely already drawn some important conclusions during this process, but let them fester for a while.

Step 3) Pull out the perfect life document and write down 2 or 3 goals that will bring you closer to that per- Budgeting resources:
fect life.

Be specific...what does reaching the goal mean? When will you reach the goal? What types of resources do you Quicken
need in pursuit of the goal? Whom will you be pursuing the goal with? Excel
www.mint.com
Again you want to be very open with your thinking, don't censor the goal and allow yourself to dream. www.mvelopes.com
Pencil and paper
This time, however, you are also planning on moving toward achievement of the goal. You will introduce logic
and consider how to reach the goal and you will determine what is currently realistic about pursuing that per-
Envelope system
fect live. You may never reach that life, but now you are planning progress toward achievement.

Step 4) Reassess the budget you created in step 2. How do you feel about your spending patterns? Did any-
thing in your budget surprise you? Or were there expenses or amounts spent which made you uncomfortable?
Maybe you even noticed some items that you would really like to spend more on.

Now begin tweaking your budget to better match your values. If you didn't like some of your spending pat-
terns, reduce the amount available to spend in those categories. Increase spending in areas you value more
than you current spend on.

Most importantly, add the goals you created to your budget. Make sure you leave money available to pursue
these goals. Consider these goals untouchable in your budget. Adding your highly valued goals to your budget
creates commitment to the budget. Reduce spending on less important things to be able to fund those goals.

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Control The Controllable —Ignore Everything Else

The Power of Cash

From time to time we all make poor financial decisions. These poor decisions are inevitable, but there are
some tools to help make them less frequent.ly At Couples Financial Planning & Coaching, LLC, we highly rec-
ommend using cash for as much regular spending as possible. Using cash powerfully impacts your relationship
with money.

Cash is tangible. You can touch cash. You can see how much cash is in your wallet. When you spend cash,
your are more fully aware of the money you are spending than you would be by using a credit card, debit card
or even a check. Using cash helps you gain control of impulse spending and spending you are doing uncon-
sciously. Combining using cash with a well-developed budget may be the single most powerful financial step
you can take to improve your financial well-being.

Cash also has power to protect you from emergencies. We believe that you should maintain at all times a large
emergency fund held in cash or cash equivalents (checking and savings accounts, money market accounts,
etc…). General financial planning advice recommends holding enough cash to cover 3-6 months of expenses.
We recommend building an emergency fund of at least 6 months PLUS enough cash for any large cash expen-
ditures you expect to incur over the next 3 years.

“Cash is tangible. This is understandably a very lofty goal. If you have plans for purchasing a home or a car, having enough cash
for those purchases today certainly appears daunting. If this is the case, strive to save that money as quickly as
You can touch possible. Put off investing money (other than money to receive employer retirement fund matches) until you
cash. You can see have met your cash savings goals.
how much cash is Having a cash cushion this large will provide you tremendous control of your financial situation. You will feel
in your wallet…” remarkable freedom surrounding your financial choices. You will be well protected in the event of an emer-
gency. Cash truly is powerful.

Convenience Is Bad
Modern life has offered us many conveniences to make our money more accessible. While these conveniences
can often provide simple ways to handle day to day expenses, they also carry a downside. Making access to
money easy and spending almost unseen by the use of debit card, credit cards & online shopping can often lead
to spending patterns that do not support our goals.

At Couples Financial Planning & Coaching, LLC we do believe in using these devices to your advantage by auto-
mating difficult things such as saving money for goals by using direct deposit from paychecks. However, we do
highly recommend using cash for regular spending to maintain control.

Discovery Questions
Credit and debit
How do you currently pay for the majority of your regular expenses?
cards offer conven-
ience. Unfortunately
they also increase
unaccounted for Do you feel in control of your spending and bills currently?
spending and loss of
financial control.

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Control The Controllable—Ignore Everything Else

Staying On Track
At Couples Financial Planning & Coaching, LLC we strongly believe that the highest probability method to im-
proving financial well-being is to ―Control The Controllable—Ignore Everything Else‖. We also recognize that
it is very easy to fall into spending time and effort worrying about things out of our control. We have sug-
gested some strategies below to help you refocus on the controllable periodically.

 Review your budget at least annually and any time there is a significant change in your income or expenses

 Schedule quarterly ―Control Checks‖ on your calendar to make sure you have been focusing on items An accountability
within your control partner checking on
you can help you
 Find an accountability partner who will check in with you periodically and whom you keep accountable for remain focused on
focusing on the controllable. This could be your spouse, but is preferably a reliable friend or colleague the controllable
whom you trust.

 As you make financial decisions, monitor your internal dialog. Are your decisions being influenced by fac-
tors in your control or are you allowing uncontrollable factors to have an impact?

 Maintain a daily journal reviewing your daily decisions and what influenced you during the decision-making
process

“...monitor your
internal dialog.
What’s Next?
Are your
decisions being
We hope you have found this E-Course helpful and hope it will offer you a guide to focus on the controllable
forces in your financial life. Many of these things can be done on your own without a great deal of effort. How-
influenced by
ever, many people want or need the help of a financial planner to get financial control and keep that control. factors in your
control…”
At Couples Financial Planning & Coaching, LLC we focus on controlling the controllable and help our clients
achieve this goal. If you are interested in learning more about our services and if they are right for you, we
encourage you to contact us to set up a free 30 minute consultation. You can also learn more about Couples
Financial Planning & Coaching, LLC on the back cover of this E-Course.

Control The Controllable—Ignore Everything Else

 About Couples Financial Planning & Coaching, LLC
Our Mission & Who We Serve
Our Mission

To have a profound, positive impact on people’s lives by helping newlywed and other young couples
bring their finances together and create a unified vision for their lives and partnership.

Who We Serve

Our practice and services are designed for couples early in the process of establishing their couple-
Contact Information: hood. We work with couples in the first 10 years of their relationship and couples beyond that pe-
Phone 920-358-0150 riod who have not yet fully integrated their financial lives.
Fax 920-967-0454
Our practice is designed to help those couples bring their finances together in a healthy and produc-
Email
tive manner and to put the couplehood on a path of financial harmony.
contact@couplesfinancialplanning.com
Web
www.couplesfinancialplanning.com
Our Core Values
Mindfulness – being fully and non-judgmentally aware of feelings and emotions both in clients and ourselves

Authenticity – helping clients and ourselves recognize the financial freedom to live as we truly hope to and
taking steps to achieve that authentic life

Objectiveness – recognizing each person is individual and that all beliefs and goals are correct for each per-
“To have a son
profound, positive
Curiosity – a desire to truly and deeply understand and learn about our clients and ourselves
impact on
people’s lives…” Helpfulness – a deep passion to provide service to others and ourselves

Fiduciary – to put our clients interests ahead of all others and to each day work to remove all existing and
potential conflicts of interest

Positivity – a positive approach to achieving your goals and approaching roadblocks will offer a much better
path than trying to ―fix‖ problems

Disclosure
Financial Planning is Not Exact & Provides No Guarantees
The results in a plan cannot be exact. The accuracy of your financial plan is directly impacted by the quality of data provided by you to CFPC.
When you are planning over many years, small inaccuracies and changes in the early years create large differences in future results. You should
use this plan to help you focus on the factors that are most important to your financial success and to see how decisions you make now might
impact your future. Planning will offer you a framework for making these decisions to increase the likelihood of achieving your goals.

The results presented in this plan are based in large part on the information you provided plus many assumptions. While these assumptions are
reasonable based upon current and historical information, no plan has the ability to accurately predict the future. As investment returns, inflation
and taxes differ from the projected assumptions, your actual results will vary (perhaps significantly) from those presented in this plan. Prudent
financial planning will increase your chances for success, but cannot guarantee your goals will be achieved.

Historical returns of indices are for illustrative purposes only and are not an indication of future performance of either the indices or any particu-
lar investment. It is not possible to directly invest in an index. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Investment returns and principal
value of an investment will fluctuate so that an investor's shares, when redeemed, may be worth more or less than their original cost.