Quiet Failure: Time for Me to Say What I Think

I’m beginning to feel like I’m sitting on the sideline watching everyone else play. So far, I’ve asked questions (The Quiet Failure of Good Advice), listened to your answers, and fed back what I’ve heard (Reflections on a Quiet Failure). Thank you all again.

But maybe it’s time for me to say what I think.

Both questions I asked in Reflections on a Quiet Failure, in different ways, ask what financial planning is for. Let me share where my own thinking has landed.

I’ve come to believe that the goal of financial planning is to support the life the household is trying to live. Not to maximize a number, not to optimize a portfolio, not even to “achieve financial security” in the abstract sense. The household has — or should have — some sense of what it wants its years to look like: where it wants to live, who it wants to support, what it wants to do, what it wants to leave behind. Financial planning’s job is to make those things possible, or to surface honestly that they aren’t, so the household can adjust either the means or the goals.

The vision comes first. The numbers come second. I find this framing more useful than the technical one because it tells me when a plan has succeeded and when it hasn’t. A household that arrives at age 80 with substantial assets and a long list of “we never got around to that” has failed at financial planning in a way the spreadsheet won’t show. A household that lived its years with intent, even with more modest resources, has succeeded in a way the spreadsheet also won’t show.

On measuring success: I’d say a plan is working when the household stops worrying about money in the foreground and starts thinking about living life. Not because the money is unlimited, but because the structure has become trustworthy enough to fade from attention. That’s a high bar. Most of us, including most professionals, don’t quite reach it. But it’s the right bar, I think, and naming it changes what we’re aiming at.

Grateful for everyone who engaged with the original post and its follow-up. The conversation has been a gift.