Your biggest asset is your career. This is a guest post written by Holly Gillian Kindel, a senior financial advisor at Mosaic Financial Partners. The company is a financial planning firm that has developed a free financial fitness challenge to help people figure out their financial life.
When you think of assets, your first thoughts may be of tangible things like houses, investment portfolios, or even collectible baseball cards. But at this very moment your biggest, most valuable asset is likely YOURSELF. Your career is like your secret weapon from which all your financial wealth in this lifetime will come.
Career Asset Management is a part of financial planning that takes into consideration your ability to optimize your resources as the source of your prosperity. From this perspective, your career is the sum total of your time, talent and potential.
The Journey, Not the Destination
It’s important to focus on what you want from life and how to make the most of what you have to work with. This goes beyond the old school practice of just settling for what’s out there. Financial planning should really be about getting the most out of your life, and having satisfaction in your career plays a big part of that.
Be Ready for Change
Life is not static and you need a plan that offers a process for navigating the changes in your life, not an antiquated approach that assumes a straight line path from the day you start work to the day you retire. By taking time to ensure your career can weather turbulent times you will actually have a better chance of long-term financial success.
Widen Your Possibilities
By viewing your career as an asset, you can explore your options on a continuum that spans many possibilities: training, working, sabbaticals and financial independence (which can allow you to choose to work for the joy of it). Each of these choices represents an opportunity to optimize your career and extend the life-cycle of your Career Asset.
To get a better picture of the current state of your career as an asset, take some time to consider the following questions:
- What is the purpose of work to you? Is it a paycheck, a source of personal fulfillment or something in between?
- What are you passionate about?
- If you decided to give a portion of your earning capacity to support a cause that expresses your values and beliefs, to whom would you give the money?
- If money weren’t a necessity, what form of employment would you pursue?
- If you or your partner were to become suddenly unemployed, assuming all financial issues had been planned for, what would be your first thought?
- With whom would you have your first conversations?
- What first steps would you take?
- Do you feel a sense of obligation to any of the following when it comes to your career? For what reason?
- Family
- Friends
- Society
- If you or your significant other were to switch careers what specific financial obligations would you have that you want to make sure you have enough resources to cover (e.g. mortgage, emergency fund, education funding, living standards, etc.)?
Once you answer these questions you’ll have a better vision of what’s important to you. If some of the questions brought-up issues that you may not have thought about before, congratulations! You are breaking new ground which creates a fabulous foundation for change.
What Happens Next?
The next step is for you to consider how you would like to proceed with embarking on the management of your career asset and who can support you in the life-long process. If you find that you are at a crossroads, it is helpful to do some planning to figure out how you can make a change to a career that is better able to give you what you want from life. To help you get the process going, you can join the Mosaic Financial Fitness Challenge, which will walk you through the essentials for a financial plan that incorporates career asset management.
