House. Money. Stocks. Cars. When we are asked, “What are your assets?” these are what most of us answer. But are they your only assets? I give seminars about wealth strategies, money, personal finance, and uniformly I receive the answers above, which are our Financial assets. However, when I rephrase the question into “What do you have that you care most about?” and I always make sure to address it to a woman (alas, men are not as much there in their consciousness), the answer is consistently, “my family, my children.” Those who are above 40-50 years of age add “health”, and later “values, beliefs, heritage.” Lee Brower, who is the “father” of this approach, calls them “Core/ Human” assets. Isn’t it interesting that the assets we think of as “our assets” and the assets we care about are not really the same?

Then I ask further, “What is it that you have accumulated, that you can use regardless of what happens?” The answers are, “Knowledge, skills, experience, methods and systems.” Those are, according to Lee Brower, the “Wisdom/Experience” assets. Then, when asked, “Which type of assets would you give up, assuming you had to, but could keep the other two and transfer them?” everyone elects to forgo the Financial assets and keep the Core and Wisdom ones. The fourth dimension is the social/civic assets we have, which
include contributions, monetary or otherwise, that we make to our communities and society. Yet, society still puts more value on working outside the house “in the financial quadrant”, than working in the house, “in the Core and Wisdom quadrants.” Women who elect to stay at home and raise the kids don’t enjoy the same prestige their working husbands do. For women it is even a double edge sword, because a woman that does elect to focus on the Financial quadrant is often less valued than her male counterpart.

To achieve such a unified approach requires several elements. The first is a framework that supports it, and provides a basis upon which to build. The second is willingness of the family to embrace such a vision and approach and come together in creating it. The third is a guide and a planner who can provide a family with guidance on how to create their vision. The fourth is the plan itself, which should include the financial one, which is critical to create a basis for supporting and achieving dreams and goals across all assets. I am writing a book titled, “The Funnel of Life: why our dreams shrink and die, and how we can make them grow again,” which is based on a framework I developed after seeing many people who had lost their dreams. Unfortunately, I have seen it more often with women, who had put their life and effort into the family, only to be left without big dreams and goals when the kids left home, although, in some cases, it happens even earlier. This is not to say that it doesn’t happen to men; it does and is quite prevalent as well. Indeed, the loss or shrinking of dreams happens because we lose our purpose, we no longer have a vision for our life, and do not have goals and plans that we can translate to results, to feed new dreams.

I also found that the best “entrance” to creating new dreams, and renewing old ones when relevant, is when we create a financial plan. The reason is that much of what we feel and think to be our constraints has to do with money and finances. Even if such is not the case, we protect ourselves by placing the reasons there. By creating a new financial plan,
one that is designed to support the new vision we have for our family, and ourselves, we can allow ourselves to dream again. By removing, or at least changing, financial constraints, and creating new financial opportunities, we can allow new dreams and goals to enter our lives. However, to do so we have to create the financial plan in conjunction with going through the process of creating our new, unified across assets, vision.

My wife, Kate, and I are partners in our firm, Life Group, LLC, which we created to manifest our vision for our family, and to allow us to help others manifest their vision. In order for us to create our vision, we had to understand what our assets are, and how we can optimize them to achieve a unified vision for our life together. We found out that for us, it goes through working together, which is a very specific and personal solution, as all solutions should be.

I suggest you embark on this journey and embrace a true asset optimization approach to create wealth in all the quadrants of your life.