Financial Planning Information

What is a financial plan? In its simplest form, a financial plan is like a roadmap on one side with a picture of the destination on the other. Just like planning a trip, planning your financial future takes a few things. First, you must know where you are. In financial terms this means having a clear understanding of your income, expenses, assets, and debts. A solid financial plan looks at these four categories and figures out what they will be in the future.

A good financial planner knows the right questions to ask. After all of the information is gathered, a trained financial planner will be able to show you how different decisions, both today and in the future, will affect your financial goals. This addresses the second point of a financial roadmap, which is how to get to your destination.

A good financial plan involves a bit of back-and-forth between the client and the planner, since often the first round of the financial plan raises more questions for the client. With a traditional financial planner, this process can get quite expensive. A fair hourly rate for a financial planner can be more than $200. The financial planning process can take more than ten or fifteen hours at times, and at $200 per hour, the bill can add up quite quickly.

PennyPuddle uses software to do the initial data gathering and calculations, but leaves the report writing and nuanced question asking to professionals (i.e. real human beings). By doing this, we can reduce the time needed to write a customized financial plan to two or three hours instead of ten, which substantially reduces the cost of the plan.

For some, even the cost of a PennyPuddle plan may be a bit more than fits into their budget. That’s ok, and we try to offer as much helpful, free information as possible. For many of us, having a professionally developed financial plan from PennyPuddle is a smart way to invest in the future and make sure we reach our destination.