Bring Your Future Into View
Set Sail On The Cruise Ship ‘Compass’
How Do You View Your Future?
Your future is a journey filled with hopes and dreams. Investments are tools to help you achieve your dreams. How you use your tools, could be the difference between whether you realize your dreams – or not.
Financial Compass specializes in helping clients use their tools appropriately to achieve their financial dreams. Dreams are individual in nature and are different for every person. Your dreams are unique.
Dreams are most often achieved through a process. There are no get rich quick schemes that will reliably get you to where you want to go.
Have you ever taken a cruise on a ship? Have you ever wanted to take a cruise? Do you know someone who has taken a cruise? Do you know what is involved in being a passenger on a cruise ship? Your future is like taking a long cruise. Both set sail from a home port towards some destination. And both encounter situations, expected and unexpected, along the route.
Much care goes in to planning a cruise. Passengers begin by deciding on a destination – where they want to go. They may plan a Caribbean cruise, an Alaskan cruise, a Mediterranean cruise, or it may be a cruise through the Panama Canal, beginning in Miami and ending in Los Angeles. Additional planning includes traveling from their home to and from wherever the ship sets sail from and it’s final destination, either here in the United States or overseas.
Once the final destination has been determined, a list of exciting excursion tours offer guests the opportunity to leave the ship and experience the flavor of the local culture – visiting places of historic importance, sampling the local food and music, shopping for souvenirs, enjoying white sandy beaches, and others are reviewed, prioritized, and planned.
Planning this trip may begin months, even years in advance. It involves determining the cost of the cruise, establishing a budget and deciding how much money to allocate not only for the cost of the trip, but also the excursion tours, items needed to take on the trip, money to spend on board ship, and money for souvenirs to give to loved ones as a legacy of their trip.
Unfortunately, all of the planning that goes into the trip does not guarantee that the journey will go smoothly. It cannot prevent the unexpected. People may get injured or sick prior to setting sail, resulting in trip cancellation. Once the ship sets sail they may get seasick, they may even need to leave the ship and return home early.
In addition, rough or stormy weather, may turn the expectations of a sunny holiday into a rainy miserable trip. During those times, a competent captain utilizes many tools to navigate the ship along the journey. Also, the cruise line employs tour guide operators, medical staff, and ship stewards to assist guests, answer questions, and calm and reassure passengers as needed.
These and other unforeseen incidents may turn the best made plans sour. To guard against these unexpected risks and protect their investment in the cruise, travel insurance and medical insurance may be purchase to reimburse the traveler.
Financial Compass is like your financial cruise ship, ready to help you Bring Your Future Into View – no matter where you want your cruise to take you. We begin your journey by helping you identify what’s important to you – where you want to go in life - your goals and your dreams – as you define them. Once identified, we then help you prioritize and map out where you currently are, and how to get to where you want to go. Together we will strategize and plot a course geared towards helping you achieve your dreams. Along the way we may identify new long-term, intermediate, or short term goals such as saving for college, purchasing a new home, starting a new business, determining when and how to use your stock options, caring for elderly parents, having a successful retirement, leaving a legacy to loved ones, or any number of other goals and dreams you may have.
The winds of change may attempt to blow you off-course, so we periodically monitor our wind gauges and our map and compass to verify your position relative to your dreams. Periodically a change in course may be required and we may need to readjust the sails and chart a new course. At other times, although the 
winds and storm clouds may appear menacing, it may mean advising and counseling you to maintain the course. At times that may feel uncomfortable. However, maintaining the course often can be the difference between realizing your dreams – or being like a ship without a rudder – unable to stay on course and unable to arrive at your desired destination. At Financial Compass, we take pride in helping you stay on course so that you Bring Your Future Into View.
Most people would agree that their long-term goals and dreams are more important than planning a cruise. However in general, people spend more time planning their dream cruise than planning how to bring their future into view. Which have you spent more time doing?
Money is a necessary tool that can help you take a dream vacation cruise and/or help you achieve your financial goals and dreams. It takes the form of many different types of investments/tools. Although each tool is important, more importantly, the key to getting you to where you want to go in life is not what tools you have, but how you use your tools. The same tool can be in two different tool boxes with differing results based upon whose tool box the tool is in. A hammer in the tool box of a homeowner may repair the screen door at the entrance of a house. A hammer in the hands of a carpenter builds the house. Likewise, a compass in the hands of a cruise ship passenger, tells the traveler what direction north is. However a compass in the hands of the ship's navigator, helps passengers get to their destination. Which tool box are your tools in?
