What will your life be like in 10 years?

We underguess how different the future will be, and how resilient we are

What will your life be like in 10 years? Take a minute and project the different aspects of your life—I will give you a few topics to get started:

·        Your family: how old will your kids and grandkids be, and what will they be doing?

·        Your day-to-day living. If you’re working, what will your job responsibilities be like? If you are retired (or will be in 10 years), describe your daily life.

·        Vacations you will take.

·        Your finances: how much will you have and how much will you be living on monthly?

·        You might also include where you will be spiritually, how physically fit you will be, or other changes you expect.

If you want to write this down and then save it as “open in 2029”—you’ll get a kick out of this in ten years.

Now I bet you predicted a pretty stable next decade. You looked at what you are doing now and added or subtracted a little. That’s human nature when it comes to predicting the future—the recent past is a heavy bias for what we see in our upcoming life.

I also bet, that your next ten years will be wildly different from what you projected. My proof? Look at your life a decade ago. Most of us have done things we could not even dream of doing ten years ago. In my case, ten years ago we were done having kids (we had four) and never hallucinated we would be foster parents. I learned that I could heal from a vasectomy—we now have our fifth child Parker (who is 9), and wouldn’t have it any other way!—and have been foster parents for many little people.

I’ve heard it say that we mortals plan, and heaven chuckles. I believe it. However, that shouldn’t stop us from planning. Rather, we should approach it will a level of humility. Moreover, recognize that you are also stronger and more adaptable than might give yourself credit for.

As you are on this journey, I want to help be a co-pilot with you. Yes, we’re planning your future finances (again, with a level of humility and knowing that plans will change!). We can appreciate that good things happen as well as bad—so planning on the worst case scenario would be as faulty as assuming skyrocketing market returns.

As you plan and do your soul searching for what you want your future life to be, I’d be happy to help listen and be a sounding board for all aspects of life because most of them will have a financial component to them, large or small. I want to be there with you for this ongoing process.