2025 February Update

Over the past twelve months or so, we’ve been reading and hearing a lot about financial literacy. Specifically, that there isn’t enough of it, and many people need more.

You know we love financial knowledge, and love teaching it even more. But we don’t love the narrative around financial literacy, which generally seems to indicate:

• There’s some bar that Most People should be meeting
• It’s kind of your fault if you’re not meeting the bar
• Women, particularly, are doing a bad job

Yuck. Sounds like everyone is lining up for punishment. We’re not sure how those ideas, especially the way they’re being presented, would help anyone achieve success in their own financial lives.

Obviously, we’d like to introduce a different story. Here is ours:

• Personal finance is pretty complex
• Personal finance has become increasingly complex over the past 50 years as legislation, taxes, and financial products have multiplied, all while life expectancy has increased and health care costs have soared
• The way personal finance is taught (and sold) is not helping either of the above points

As an example of the way personal finance is taught and sold, a research paper about low financial literacy demonstrates their point by discussing how little people know about tools such as mortgages and crypto assets. Another paper discusses “unbanked” individuals and how knowledge – again – of financial products is sorely lacking.

Yes, we think an understanding of financial products and tools are important when making personal financial decisions. Just like we think that it is incredibly useful to have the right medicine to treat an ailment.

We don’t think that, as non-doctors, we should be the ones prescribing that medication to ourselves. But we do think we should know enough about ourselves to ask questions about our treatment, so we can work closely with our physicians to help create a treatment program that gets us where we want to go.

We take issue with the story that is being told about financial literacy by many well-meaning individuals and organizations. Our issue is that the onus, the blame, and the responsibility is placed on the person who needs the information and support to make good financial decisions.

If personal finance was less complex, and if we were working together as a society to make it less complex – which would be an amazing goal – then, yes, more responsibility for curating and developing this knowledge could be placed on individuals and families. But that’s not the world we live in.

As we like to say to the people we are privileged to support:

You are the expert in YOU. That’s the information we are missing and will never have expertise in.

What it means to be you, every day. What you’re excited about. What you’re worried about.

What would make your life more meaningful, and what would make it a thousand times more difficult.

That’s actually pretty hard stuff to know well, and it changes all the time. We rely on you to be the knowledge-keeper in that area, and we ask as many questions as we can to unearth those gems so we can help you make them the guiding light for how you design your finances, and what you prioritize.

From there, we can help you curate the knowledge you need and understand the resources available to help you achieve your best life, so you can make great financial decisions.

Despite how financial knowledge, planning, and (ugh) “literacy” is described in the world, the reality is there is no “One Right Way” to manage your finances. There are no blue ribbons or trophies for having The Best Budget or the The Neatest Tax Return or even The Best Stock Pick*.

*CFA Society Vancouver used to hand out an annual prize for the best stock pick. A different person won that prize every year. Which was kind of the point of the whole competition.

The most important part of your financial management system is the life you want to live. Living that life is the trophy. It’s a private one, that you might share with your partner, best friend, children, grandchildren, and your community. It’s one side – the most vital side – of the double entendre that is our tag line: Your Life, Well Spent.

At Spring Planning, we are committed to supporting you in developing clarity about the life you want to live, so that we can help you design the financial systems that will help you create that. We know, through our own experience working with you, and from everything we’ve learned from having professors and teachers in our families, that information of any kind is most potent when it is personally useful. We aim to provide you with that information as it arises, through this newsletter, and through your regular meetings.

If you run across any new strategy, legislation, or change and you’re wondering whether or not this is something that would be helpful for you to understand, today, in your current situation, we want you to know you can feel great about asking us. You never know – it might be, and we’d love to help you fit the things that make sense for you into your financial plan.

Your Spring Planning Team

Practice Notes:

Spring is almost here! The season, we mean, which officially starts in the northern hemisphere on Thursday March 20th. It also ushers in Spring Planning’s 8th anniversary, which we like to call our “Springaversary”. For those of you working with us even longer than 8 years, that might seem confusing – our predecessor company, JYC Financial, started 13 years ago, when Julia left traditional financial services to open one of the few advice-only planning firms in Canada at the time. We’re proud to be part of the growing community of advice-only financial planners and look forward to continuing to serve you for many years to come!

Julia will be attending a conference between March 15th and March 19th, returning to the office right in time for the spring season to start on March 20th. 

Spring in the News:

Barry Choi from Investment Executive spoke with Julia about how FPAC supports new advisors entering the financial services industry. Read the full article here.

Please check out our media page here for videos, podcasts, interviews and more.

Planning News Digest:

• Losing your work identity – Retirement can come with some significant personal issues, including an identity crisis. This article from the Globe and Mail features UBC professor Nancy Holmes’ personal experience. Read more about her story here.
• There’s a point where money anxiety disappears, right? Not always. There’s more to solving money anxiety than simply having a lot of it, unfortunately. This story explains how sometimes, even wild amounts of wealth, don’t solve the issues within. Check out the full article here.
• Trump’s Threat Boosts Push to Ease Trade Barriers – Our friend Preet Banerjee discusses inter-provincial trade barriers in this Instagram video. Watch the full video here.

Feature from the Archives:

Happy International Women’s Day on March 8! We’re looking forward to updating our Women & Money ebook, released on IWD 2016, to modernize it with the changes that have occurred over the past decade. While this was written as a reply to the many, many young women in their twenties who reached out to us for information, it was always intended to be useful for anyone of any gender. We hope you enjoy the original version and look forward to sharing the updated one when it’s ready!

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