Lifestyle Room

As you and your builder talk about the Lifestyle Room, you’ll explore your current lifestyle (do you enjoy it? do you want to maintain it or change it?), as well as your future lifestyle.

You can see how the Lifestyle Room ties in with the previous two rooms, right?

This room has to do not only with your budget and spending habits, but also with how you’re spending your time, creating your quality of life, enjoying your hobbies or travel, and sustaining your physical health and activities. Maybe you’re wondering what all of this talk gets you. Here’s the bottom line:

Conversation about these rooms helps both you and your adviser get clear about what you’ll be building together. It creates better understanding on both sides of the table, so the adviser can hear what’s important and real to you, and so you can see how those things are reflected in and made possible by the financial blueprint.

Building Your Financial House, unlike traditional financial planning, connects the dots between abstract financial strategies and your real life. It’s just like when you’re constructing a house. You don’t want the carpenters and electricians to be bothering you with, “Now, here, come take a look at all these wires and the kinds of nails we’re using. I’d like to walk you through every little thing to show you exactly how we’re doing it.”

No, you want to be able to say, “Just do it and give me the quality I need. This is how the room should work. I envision myself sitting in my favorite chair in this room in front of a fireplace,” or “Here’s where we want to put the flat-panel screen and theater seating, plus the wet bar for entertaining.”

Your first concern isn’t how they’re going to wire the room or install the plumbing. You want them to do their professional best—measure and plan and execute flawlessly—but you don’t want to have to look over the schematics or spend a bunch of time admiring the stuff that’s supposed to be behind the walls.

When financial advisers hand you a two-pound document they’ve labeled with terms like asset allocation and Monte Carlo analysis, it’s as if they’ve asked you to review the wiring or the pipes. With Your Financial House, you receive a financial blueprint—an overview—and if you decide you’d like to see the detailed analyses, too, you have immediate access to them.

Just realize that the lion’s share of your time will not be taken up with lessons on investing or participating in number crunching; it will be about determining what’s most important to you in Your Financial House. Of course, that doesn’t mean your adviser never crunches the numbers or looks at your current financial situation. In fact, all of that comes into play in the very next room.