Turn Your Vision Into Actions

Do you have a vision of what you want in your financial life? Does that vision include the safety, well-being and a supportive environment for your special needs family member?

Most of us walk around with thousands of thoughts racing through our heads. Sometimes, thoughts drift through that are related to our financial future and the future of our special needs family member, such as:

“I need to save more money.”

“This week I will review my investments.”

“It’s time for me to find a new job.”

“How is my daughter going to live on her own?”

“What will my husband do when I am gone?”

“Who will make sure the money I am saving for my son will be handled right?”

There are three paths you can take in helping answer your own questions and put your thoughts into action.

The first is to ignore the thoughts completely, stick your head in the sand and hope for the best. Given that the odds of that working are small, let’s not even consider it.

You have two other paths. One is to do your best and hope for the best. This means putting money into retirement plans without knowing if you are saving enough. It means having some basic life insurance in place without deciding how much you really need. It means not having a will with a special needs trust and hoping that the court makes a good decision on your behalf.

Or you can take another path—a positive path towards your stated goal. This path means sitting down to write out where you want to be. It means investing time and energy deciding which goals to achieve.

Compare this path to planning for something fun, like a vacation. Most of the time, people do not just hop in the car and go. They sit down, decide where to go, say Mom’s in Maine or Disneyland in California. They decide how to get there and what they want to do when they arrive. Will they travel by car or plane? Will the trip last a week or a weekend? Will dinners be with Mom or at a restaurant?

The rough outline of the plan then gets met with the rough idea of cost. You may have to shorten the stay at Disney from a week to four days if you cannot afford the full week. Use the extra days to visit the beach or see the museums of Los Angeles.

Planning for future needs is not very different. First, you need to have some idea of where you are going. What are your expectations for retirement? Do you want to change jobs? Are you looking at specific needs for your disabled family member?

You must be specific about some of these needs and include a timeline on them. You may want to improve the quality of life of your disabled family member. What does this mean? For some, it means being able to have an annual trip. For others it means paying for respite care for the parents. Is it a goal that gets funded once ten years for now, or is it funded annually starting at a certain date?

Once you have determined the need, you will spend time deciding how much money is required. You might want a new wheelchair every three years. Find out the cost and write that down. You might need to live on $75,000 in retirement, starting at age 65. Write that down. For each goal, be as specific as possible about how much money you will need and for how long you will need it.

The older your special needs family member is, the easier it usually is to identify their needs and your goals. People with young children at home cannot yet say how adaptable and integrated to society their child will be in 10 or 20 years.

Why is it so important to write these thoughts and goals down? After all, you can recite them pretty quickly when asked.

Writing down your goals does several things.

First, it gives you the ability to prioritize. When you walk around daydreaming about the future, it is easy to let your goals slide from one to another. It is easy to let one become more important at any given moment rather than hold to the two or three you most want to realize.

Most of the time, you will need to make choices. Do you put money into the IRA or save into an account to fund a trust? Do you wait a year to buy a car or use that money to pay off student loans? Do you wait longer to start a business or build a bigger cash reserve? Knowing your top priorities helps make these choices easier.

Second, with a well defined, prioritized list, you have the ability to alter your behaviors to achieve your goals. It is much easier not to buy an extra pair of shoes or add the full sports package to your cable contract if you know what those dollars can do. The $150 on shoes this month can turn into thousands of dollars towards the trust in 20 years. The $50 on cable can go to the travel you have decided is the priority this year.

You become better at achieving your goals as you begin to make decisions for yourself that help you. You will feel and become a more confident and capable person in other aspects of your life.

Space out some time in your life to sit down. Close your eyes and take a few deep breathes. Filter out everything else you need to do. Remember, no one else is looking over your shoulder so write down everything that comes to mind.

What we think of we can make real. It requires effort, patience and a constant reminder of why those thoughts are so important to us.