🟣🟢 Not sure what you want?

👋 Hello

Normally this lands in your inbox on Sunday, but I ran out of weekend… So here’s your midweek dose of Financial Stuff:

• 🕰️ Why future planning feels hard

• ❓ The business owner’s pre-mortem

• 🍟 The takeaway

Let’s get started 👇

As you might expect, I have lots of conversations with people about their plans for the future, especially looking ahead to retirement.

And more often than not, they’re not really sure what they want.

That might sound odd, but there’s a good reason for it.

Psychologists have shown that humans are terrible at thinking about their future selves.

We treat “future me” almost like a stranger, someone we vaguely know, but don’t really care about.

It’s known as ‘temporal discounting’ and is the tendency to value today more than tomorrow.

It’s why most people find it easy to spend but hard to save, or why a night on the sofa feels more appealing than a gym session that only “future you” benefits from.

One famous study at the Univeristy of California used MRI scans to test this…

When people thought about themselves now, one part of the brain lit up.

But when they imagined themselves in the future, the pattern changed. It looked more like they were thinking about someone else.

We also think we’ll stay the same

Another fascinating bit of research, by Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, found that people consistently underestimate how much they’ll change.

He calls it the ‘end-of-history illusion’. This is the belief that “I’ve changed a lot up to now, but from here on, I’ll probably stay the same.”

In reality, we keep changing throughout our lives, our values, interests, and priorities evolve.

That’s one reason so many people get to retirement and feel slightly lost: they built a plan around the person they used to be.

So how do you plan for a future you can’t picture?

You flip the question.

Instead of asking “What do I want?” which your brain struggles with, ask “What do I not want?”

Psychologists call this inversion thinking, and it works because we’re better at identifying potential pain than vague pleasure.

It taps into another well-documented bias: loss aversion.

People are roughly twice as motivated to avoid losses as to pursue gains.

That’s why thinking about what you don’t want - to feel bored, to run out of money, to waste healthy years, gives you clearer, faster answers than picturing a dream retirement.

It’s not negative thinking. It’s a shortcut to clarity.

The business owner’s pre-mortem.

Every business owner knows the post-mortem drill: something goes wrong, we dig into what happened, and fix it.

A pre-mortem flips that.

You imagine the failure before it happens.

So picture yourself in 2045, twenty years from now, looking back.

What went wrong?

Maybe you worked too long,

Neglected your health,

Sold the business too late (or too early).

Didn’t invest the proceeds properly.

Lost touch with friends or family.

Or you were so focused on “the number” that you forgot what it was really for.

That’s your pre-mortem. It’s not about regret, it’s about foresight.

Because once you’ve named the risks, you can plan to avoid them.

It’s the same approach that keeps a business alive:

• Spot weaknesses early.

• Put systems in place.

• Build options.

A personal pre-mortem might show your future depends entirely on one asset. Your company.

That’s a sign to diversify.

Or that your lifestyle hinges on selling for a number you’ve never tested. Time to run the cashflow.

Or that your business and personal finances are still tangled together. Time to separate them.

You already think this way for your business. It just needs applying to your own life.

The takeaway…

The people I’ve worked with who have successfully planned for the future, don’t try to predict every detail. They just have an idea of what they want, and don’t want and make the future feel close enough to care about.

Our brains may not be wired for long-term thinking, but we can work around that by:

• Visualising future you.

• Asking what you don’t want.

• And running the occasional pre-mortem to stay on track.

It’s surprisingly effective.

And if you’d like a hand turning those thoughts into a plan that makes sense both now and later, that’s exactly what we help people do every day.
👉 Book a call with me here.

😎 THAT’S IT FOR THIS WEEK

If you have any questions at all, do ping me a reply or get in touch 👇

Hilary 😉

P.S. WHAT ELSE? 👉 Book a call with me here (or if you prefer, call one of my team on 0117 9629696) and I’ll help you make sense of what you’ve got and what it could be doing for you.

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