You can be wealthy without money. Its important to have a sense of perspective on this. An excerpt from an article titled “Dick Wagner on ‘Why financial planning is the most important Profession of the Century’”. In this article he gave 10 reasons why financial planning is so important.
The mission and purpose of financial planning is to work with individuals and families and their personal relationships with money and the fearsome forces that it generates.
There is something about those “fearsome forces” – its terrifying. I mean, it’s a quintessential challenge of the 21st century. Just try to survive with this money stuff. People do something that’s really hard, which is to anticipate their needs of the last 20 or 30 years of their lives. Now, how do you do that? You have no idea what your health will be, you have no idea what your day of death is, you have no idea how long you can continue to earn a living.
Part of what financial planners need to grasp is most of us don’t have a good source of original knowledge about money. Our parents didn’t have good exposure to money and there has been nobody to teach us.
- how is wealth different from money?
I think that wealth is the quality of life, the stuff that makes life worth living. You can be wealthy without money. It’s important to have a sense of perspective on this.
We can confuse money with wealth, but typically people with a lot of money aren’t necessarily happy, and people without a lot of money can be happy.
We need to be careful how we look at money and wealth. We need to think about it more broadly and be careful when we envy. I would ask the people who have sufficiency; “Would you trade lives with someone who is on their deathbed but has huge account balances, or someone who is going through rehab that has large account balances?” Money can be a ticket out, but there are a lot of ways to screw it up, pure and simple.
How many people do you know who have been happy their whole lives, and then go through a dark night of the soul in one form or another? There are things that test the mettle of a human being, its part of the purpose of life to go through those issues. There’s a reason that money and money related topics are the second most popular topics in the Bible; these challenges are not new, People have had to learn to live with envy and greed.