Various articles and podcasts catch my eye week to week; bit by bit they help influence the direction of TCFP. Here’s a brief run through of where my thinking has been taking me recently.
TCFP strives to make a bigger difference to you and your families. The starting point is always that our relationship with you is based on truth. Both ours and yours.
From truth comes trust. It can feel uncomfortable to share our truth with you and allow you to share yours with us. Every time we, and you, get better at sharing our truths everyone around us benefits.
We need to get better at asking (with your permission) more searching questions and challenging you, and for you to challenge us. Challenging each other is not something that should be avoided if it benefits you.
My truth is that I want you to be happy and feel like you are getting great value from our relationship. Value can only be felt, not calculated, and that feeling comes from things like helping you achieve eudaimonia, a part of which is your legacy.
To me, eudaimonia describes the idea of a life well lived, a fulfilling life. A life where you have achieved what’s most important for you, your family and your community.
Increasingly I see our role as helping you discover what those important things are, how they might be achieved and what else might be achieved. Money plays a part in this, but far more important are the conversations we have and the understanding and new ideas that come to us.
Part of that feeling of a fulfilled life is captured by Charon’s obol (thanks Craig). To me this means that gathering wealth is pointless after a certain time in life.
Many of you will have significant personal wealth into your 80s and 90s, which on the face of it is a good thing. But is it really?
Won’t that mean we have done you a disservice? Doesn’t unused wealth in your 80s and 90s mean there were more things you could and should have done? That we could and should have encouraged you to do? People you could have helped? Both born and unborn? Isn’t it better to give with a warm hand than a cold one?
This is why your “legacy” is so important. Once we have helped you feel truly financially secure, we should help you help others.
Our first steps in that direction are the TCFP Foundation and the new Your Money Mentor service. Both aimed squarely at offering the next generations assistance on any number of matters completely free of charge and with no strings attached. (https://www.townclosefp.co.uk/your-money-mentor/)
You can play your part too, in any number of ways; our work with you is to help you see that more clearly than ever.