Religious ideas can help guide your secular financial planning

I love reading religious books from all religions.

The lessons I receive from them have provided context for how I think about money and helped me explore important questions with our clients. So here are some religious ideas with a secular approach to financial planning.

We are investing for an uncertain tomorrow with a belief that by doing so, we will create choices for our future. By saving or investing, we are agreeing to sacrifice something today in order to create later-day security or options. We don’t know when we will be in a position for those to occur, but we believe that by giving up something today, our tomorrow will be better.

There are parts of our lives we have earned, and there are also parts that happened through the work of others or because we beneficially handled something that came our way. I was able to put myself through college and start a company that grew beyond my expectations partly through hard work, but also because the state subsidized my tuition at the University of Minnesota. And also because I had a wife who worked and helped provide financial security when my business partner and I were trying to build our venture. There were also mentors who invested time in me, clients who believed in what we were trying to do before we fully earned that belief, and colleagues, co-workers and writers who influenced me in ways that both changed and formed my thinking. There are certainly some things that I have had that I didn’t want, and many things that I did, but all was and is an act of grace.

... yet it is one of the things for which we are always clamoring. Financial planning is not about creating certainty. It is about developing strategies to handle life’s inevitable uncertainties. What would you do differently if you had five years to live or five months to live? Alternately, will what you are currently worked up about matter in five months or five years? The financial-planning question to constantly assess is, “What can I be doing so that I will have less regret? What do I want more of, less of or none of?

Regardless of our beliefs, answers might less determine our futures than questions.

Spend your life wisely.

Ross Levin is the founder of Accredited Investors Wealth Management in Edina. He can be reached at ross@accredited.com.