What should a financial plan actually include?

Most people who've been given a financial plan have been given a bound projection. Fifty pages, a lot of charts, a probability of success to one decimal place, and a conclusion that everything looks fine.

It isn't useless. It's just not a plan. It's a model of one future, run on assumptions that were plausible the day it was produced, and it usually goes into a drawer.

A plan is different. A plan is the set of decisions you're going to make, in what order, and what would cause you to change them.

The short answer. Eight things: what you spend, where the income comes from year by year, the tax sequence, how the portfolio is built and why, what's protected, what happens to it all, the survivor's version, and what would make you change course.

What the projection is for.

The modelling matters. It's how you find out whether the shape of your situation works at all. It answers the biggest question fast: is this a plan about whether you have enough, or about what to do with more than enough? Those need completely different work.

What the projection can't do is tell you what to do on Tuesday. Its output is a probability. Your decisions are specific: convert this much this year, draw from that account, sell this position, restructure that policy, have this conversation with your children.

The number is an input to the decisions. Too often it's presented as the conclusion.

The eight parts.

What you spend. Must and choose, separated. Every other figure depends on it, and it's the one most often estimated rather than measured. See how much do you actually spend.

Where the income comes from, year by year. Not a withdrawal rate, for reasons we set out separately. Which account funds which year, and what that does to your taxable income in each.

The tax sequence. Where your bracket sits now, where it will sit once required withdrawals and Social Security begin, and what you should be doing in the years between. See tax planning and which account to draw from first.

How the portfolio is built, and why. Allocation, asset location, cost, and concentration, justified against what the money is for rather than against an index. See how to build a portfolio you can stick with.

What's protected and what isn't. Liability limits against your actual net worth, income protection while you're earning, and the care question answered rather than avoided. See is your insurance keeping up.

What happens to it. Beneficiary designations checked against current intent, documents that match the estate you now have, and the conversation with the next generation. See what an estate plan needs to cover and trust or will.

The survivor's version. Run as its own scenario. A plan that works for two can strain for one, and finding that out early is the entire point. The wider set of retirement questions is in you've saved enough, now what.

What would make you change course. The most valuable page and the one most often missing. Decisions made in advance, calmly, about what a 30% decline or a health change or an early retirement would mean, and what you'd do. Written down before you need it, because that's when you'll think clearly about it.

What makes it yours rather than generic.

Two families with identical balance sheets get different plans. That isn't a marketing line, it's arithmetic plus intent.

The same accounts arranged for a couple who want to give substantially during their lifetime produce a different plan than for a couple who intend to spend it. A business owner facing a sale in three years has a different sequence than a retired professional with a pension. Someone with an adult child who needs ongoing support has constraints someone else doesn't.

Anything that reads as though it could have been written for someone else probably was.

Nothing here sits on its own.

This is why a plan is one document rather than several. A Roth conversion changes your Medicare premium. Realizing a gain changes what that conversion costs. A large charitable gift changes both. Funding a 529 heavily uses bracket room you were saving. Paying off a mortgage requires a sale that triggers a gain.

Every one of those is defensible alone and can be wrong in combination. Your income, investments, taxes, retirement, and legacy make up one connected whole, so a decision in one changes what's possible in another. Treating them separately is how households with excellent individual decisions end up with a mediocre outcome.

A plan is a practice, not a document.

The plan that exists on paper and is never revisited describes a life that has since changed. Jobs change, markets move, the law changes, children's circumstances change, health changes.

The value isn't in the document. It's in someone looking at it as those things happen and adjusting before the adjustment becomes urgent. That ongoing attention is the actual service, and it's the hardest part to evaluate before you've experienced it.

If you have a plan you haven't looked at in a while, or a projection you were given instead of a plan, let's talk.