What I actually learned building my first mock financial plan

What I set out to do

This summer I am interning at Integritas Wealth Strategies under Daniel Heidel, and one of my first real assignments was to build a mock financial plan for a couple. I worked in RightCapital, the planning software the firm uses. The job was to take everything about their situation, their income, the debt they were carrying, and their goals for their kids and their retirement, and turn it into one plan that actually held together. It sounds simple when you say it in a sentence. Sitting down to actually do it was a different thing.

What was harder than I expected

The first hard part was the budget. This couple was in debt, and the challenge was building a plan that dug them out without stripping away everything they wanted from their life. It is easy to cut a budget to the bone on paper. Doing it in a way a real family could actually live with is the harder version, and that balance was the piece I kept coming back to.

The second was the language. Financial planning runs on abbreviations, and at the start I did not know most of them. I had to teach myself the shorthand as I went so I could follow what I was building and why each part of it mattered.

The third was mindset. I learned to always plan for the worst, especially when the numbers belong to someone else. When you are working with a person's finances, optimistic assumptions are not a favor to them. Planning for the downside is.

The one lesson that stuck

The biggest lesson came from the goals. The couple had very high ambitions, and part of my job was to bring those back down to what their numbers could actually support. I had to lay out what their real priorities needed to be first: saving for retirement, diversifying their investments, putting their kids through college, and getting out of debt. The lavish trips they wanted to take every year, the kind they could not actually afford yet, come after that foundation is built, not before.

That is the part I still think about. A financial plan is not about telling people what they want to hear. It is about being honest with them about what their money can do right now, and building from there.