Your Financial Balance Sheet vs Your Emotional Balance Sheet.

We spend most of our lives building our financial balance sheet, but what about our emotional one? This may sound odd, but as we get older, we all know that having unlimited wealth is not a guarantee of living a happy life. It is easy to fall into the trap of ending up with a strong financial balance sheet while being close to bankrupt on our emotional one.

As a Lifestyle Financial planner, I have encountered this situation in many of our clients’ lives. It is then that helping the person or family find a healthy balance and keeping that balance becomes the main focus of our work with those clients.

 Embarking on this journey may sound scary, but in actual fact, it’s not. All it takes is reconnecting with one’s true values and then ensuring that how we live our lives reflects them.

We can all recognise a healthy financial balance sheet, but what does the emotional one look like? To us, a healthy emotional balance sheet often includes things such as:

• Family.
• Staying home with the kids.
• Great relationships with friends.
• Happy memories & experiences.
• Time outside in nature.
• Having quiet time to reflect.
• Knowing when we have enough.

Unfortunately, the financial services industry’s primary focus is someone’s money and not their person, so this important aspect is often overlooked. It is often also how society perceives someone as being successful or not. 

A healthy financial balance sheet can certainly assist one in feeding the emotional one. Still, standing on its own, it serves little purpose. Getting and keeping the balance right between the two takes effort and means understanding certain trade-offs that must be made throughout life. We can’t have everything. However, once we have the balance, we feel we have everything we want.

Some of us are fortunate, in that we understand how to get and keep this balance early in life. However, it is easy to slip into imbalance, and in most cases, it is an unintended consequence of financial success.

It’s never too late to rebalance the two, and recognising that we may have an imbalance is the first and most important step. Then, take steps to make some changes and ask for help if you are unsure how to move forward.

Even Tiger Woods had a coach.

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