The Financial Values Exercise That Makes Your Plan Actually Work

Here’s a question most people have never been asked in a financial planning meeting: What does a good life actually look like for you?

Not “When do you want to retire?” or “What’s your risk tolerance for investments?” Instead, we at Guiding Wealth believe that every financial planning discussion should start with you, what you value most, and whether or not your money is actually going there.

You might expect that a financial plan would be based on the numbers: income, savings rate, projected returns, retirement date. Those things matter, and a good financial plan will have those! However, a plan built around numbers alone misses something fundamental: the numbers are supposed to serve your life… not the other way around. 

If no one has ever asked you what you want your life to look like, you might find yourself with a financial plan that feels restrictive or intimidating.

At Guiding Wealth, we start somewhere different. Before we talk about investments or tax strategies or retirement timelines, we ask clients to complete a financial values exercise — and it’s one of the most useful things we do.

Here, we’re going to walk you through a version of our financial values exercise that you can do at home. This way, you can start to think about your money in new ways.

 

Step #1: Start the Financial Values Exercise

Before you look at a single number, read through a list of values and select every one that genuinely resonates with who you are and how you want to live. These values do not have to be tied to money; they should reflect what is most important to you.

For a list with more values, click here.

It’s very important to select what actually matters to you, not what you think “sounds good” or what you “should” select. Don’t overthink it, either! If it resonates, select it, and choose at least ten.

From that longer list, you’ll then narrow down to your top five to seven values. These are the ones you would want reflected in your everyday life, relationships, and financial decisions. Then, the next step is to describe what each value (of your top 5-7) means to you personally.

This is because words mean different things to everyone. “Family” might mean your children rather than your entire family, or it might even mean your friends who’ve become family. The same goes for values like “security,” or “freedom,” or “achievement.” Two people can share the same value word and mean entirely different things by it. That personal definition is what we actually plan around.

This process produces something more useful than a list of financial goals: a clear picture of what you actually want to optimize your money for, and where you want it to flow. Your values will tell you (or your planner) what you want your life to feel like. These values also give you a North Star; something to point to, 10 or 20 or 30 years from now, as evidence that your money was well spent.

Step #2: Look at Where Your Money Is Actually Going

At Guiding Wealth, once we understand what someone values and how satisfied they are in each area, we look at their current financial picture, especially their cash flow. This helps us answer a simple question: Does the money match the values?

In our experience working with clients, there is almost always a gap. Not because people are irresponsible, but because spending, like most behavior, happens largely on autopilot. Subscriptions accumulate, habits form, the mortgage gets paid, the groceries get bought, and whatever is left over gets allocated by default rather than by design. 

Over time, money that could be funding experiences with family, a health investment, or a creative pursuit you’ve been putting off for years quietly disappears into categories that don’t actually make the list.

This financial values exercise makes that misalignment visible in a way that a budget spreadsheet can’t. When you can see that you value security over adventure, the conversation about reallocation becomes much more obvious — and a lot easier! It’s not us telling you what to prioritize. It’s your own values telling you.

A few things consistently come up in these conversations:

The gap between stated values and actual spending.

We find that many clients list family as a top value but most haven’t taken a meaningful trip with their kids within the next, say, three years. Some have a top value of health but haven’t allocated anything meaningful toward it, such as a nutritionist, personal trainer, or gym subscription. We have worked with people who deeply value personal growth but haven’t invested in learning or development in as long as they can remember.

The area they forgot to protect.

When expenses grow, and life seems to cost more every day, people tend to cut from the areas that feel optional. Fun, adventure, personal growth… These are things that make life feel fulfilling. A financial plan that treats these as afterthoughts often produces a financially “successful” life that doesn’t actually feel satisfying.

The area where spending continues out of habit, not intention.

Sometimes significant money flows toward something you don’t deeply value, like a membership, a recurring expense, or a category that made sense once and was never revisited. When you review your annual charges with your values in mind, it’s a lot easier to see what needs to be cut. 

A Note on “Balance”

This financial values exercise is not designed to make sure you perfectly balance how you spend or save your money. Balance isn’t equal time or money spent on every value. It’s the right proportion, guided by honest self-knowledge and an awareness that life sometimes changes. 

Someone in a season of life where career demands are high and children are young won’t necessarily be able to set aside money for everything they value. That’s just the season they’re in!

What the exercise actually reveals isn’t whether you’re balanced — it’s whether you’re intentional. We at Guiding Wealth want the shape of your financial life to reflect choices you’ve made or patterns you’ve drifted into. Whether it’s the areas that feel depleted because you chose to invest elsewhere, or because something quietly fell off the priority list without you noticing.

We know that a financial plan aligned with what your life looks like today is very different from a plan that’s designed for someone else.

What Changes When You Plan This Way

When a financial plan starts with this kind of self-knowledge, a few things shift:

Goals become specific.

“I want to travel more” becomes “I want to take one meaningful trip with my family every year, and here’s what we need to set aside to make that happen.” Vague intentions become plannable decisions.

Tradeoffs become clearer.

Every financial decision involves a tradeoff. When you know what matters most, in your own words, you can evaluate those tradeoffs against something real. This isn’t about what you think you should prioritize, but rather what you actually do.

The plan feels like yours.

Clients who build a plan anchored in their own values feel more motivated to follow it, more clear about what they’re working toward, and more satisfied with the outcome, even when the numbers aren’t dramatically different from what they had before. That’s because the plan is finally theirs!

Spending shifts intentionally.

When you can see where your money is going relative to what you value, reallocating feels less like deprivation and more like reclaiming something. Moving money toward what matters and away from what doesn’t tends to feel like a gain, not a loss.

The Guiding Wealth Process

Most financial plans start with the numbers. Ours starts with you.

The values exercise is just one of the ways we might work a new client. Our goal is always to understand what our clients want their lives to look like, and how their plan can support that. Before we build a strategy, we want to know what you value, what your life looks like right now, and where your money is (and isn’t) reflecting what matters most to you.

If you’re interested in getting to the root of what matters to you with a team that will build your financial plan around that, we’d love to have that conversation. Contact Guiding Wealth today!