By Carl Richard’s of The BAM Alliance

Every time I revisit Carl Richard’s back-of-a-napkin financial planning sketches they make me stop and think, is my spending in line with my values? I think so, however, I did just spend quite a bit of money on a new sound bar for my living room. Does that mean I value quality sound, down-time, or my couch? While the answer to my internal dialogue is likely all of the above, they’re definitely not my deepest values and serve as a friendly reminder to revisit my deepest values to make sure I’m allocating my resources to them consistently. In this week’s Distillery, Carl Richards helps model how to think deeper and uncover your deepest values, and begin/resume allocating your spending to them.

So, what’s important about money to you?

This is an uncomfortable question because we aren’t used to thinking about money in those terms. But it’s one of my favorite questions to ask. Even before talking about goals or building a personal balance sheet, you might find it helpful to ask yourself this question. While I’m not certain of the question’s origins, I first learned of it about a decade ago in a book by Bill Bachrach. It was about the importance of understanding your values when making important financial decisions. I’ve been using the question ever since. The purpose of this question isn’t to think in terms of goals. It’s meant to go deeper than that, or to get at the reason why we have certain goals. The first answers people come up with are usually easy — things like…Read More