January 2020 Update

Happy 2020! Happy Year of the Rat! Happy EVERYTHING!

If you’ve been reading along with us for a few years, you’ll already know that Julia is of the opinion that the time between January 1st and the Lunar New Year (January 25 this year) is our “practice run”. 

It can be pretty tough to come out of the gate on January 1st with your previous year fully reviewed and your goals set and sorted for the year ahead, yet we tend to ask this of ourselves each year. After a busy holiday season, let’s give ourselves an appropriate amount of time to consider and process where we’ve been, and a bit more time to test run our grand ideas. 

By the time you read this update, we will have passed the third week in January, often cited as a collectively sad week, when our holiday credit card bills have come in and the cracks start to appear in our ambitious plans. Phew! At least that is behind us. Now is the time to regroup, rehash, and reconsider. Now is the time to set goals you will actually achieve. 

Remember that at Spring, we like to keep our perspective in the long term. Little bumps in the road can happen every week, every month, every quarter. It’s the vision on the horizon, and the tiny steps we make towards it over time, that matter most. If you’ve tripped a bit or made a mistake, that’s cool. That’s how we figure out what doesn’t work, and it brings us closer to what does. Our ability to bounce back resiliently, revisit our original hypothesis, and start anew is what keeps us moving forward, towards achieving our own personal versions of success. 

Your version of success isn’t fixed, just like you and the world around you are not. While we all crave certainty in an uncertain world, we are, as human beings, built for adaptation. Our strength lies in our ability to navigate that uncertainty, applying our innovation to create those things that had previously only existed in our imaginations. That’s what the work we do at Spring is all about. 

Some people come to us with the hopes that a financial or cash flow plan will provide them with a very certain template for living their lives well. They hope that a plan will somehow foresee all possible complications and considerations in the future. The reality is that financial and cash flow planning – and the plans it produces – is the activity that allows each one of us to understand where we are, what we want (at least for now), and how to make decisions as new situations arise in order to continuously work towards our own visions. It’s not possible to imagine every situation and every outcome, but it is possible to prepare, and set ourselves up for great success. That’s what the cycle of planning is all about.

As you know, 2019’s theme was design thinking – the mindset shift that gave you permission to design your life. In 2020, we’re going to demonstrate exactly how that applies to financial and cash flow planning, by providing you with stories from Spring’s trenches. What we want for you in 2020 is to combine the design thinking philosophy we rambled on about last year to your own reality. We’re going to show you exactly how we do that in each month’s feature article. 

Of course, we’ll continue to read like crazy, because if we’re not learning, then we are falling behind. This month, Sandi delivers (again and again) with a review of Your Digital Undertaker by Sharon Hartung – a practical book on sorting your estate in the current technological environment – as well as another installment of the articles worth your time. We’ve also put out a quick list of all the shiny new numbers that have arrived for 2020, including TFSA contribution amounts and so much more. 

We know your time is precious and we thank you for continuing to read along with us in a new year – 2020 is going to be fantastic!

Got a question about your cash flow or financial plan? Email us at [email protected].

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