The following is an expert from the book:
Values-Based Financial Planning™
The Art of Creating an Inspiring Financial Strategy.
- by Bill Bachrach

There are 168 hours in every week, the way you spend your time directly affects your quality of life. The exercise you’re about to do is designed to focus you on what’s most important in your life, and help you further discern what activities will contribute the most to your quality of life. “The Quality of Life Enhancer™ Worksheet” is based on two principles:

1. The more you can align your behavior with your core values (what’s most important to you), the happier, more satisfied, and fulfilled you’ll be; and
2. The more you delegate what’s less important, the more time you have for what’s more important.

These principles follow two basic facts of life:

1. There are only 168 hours in a week, no matter your age, how much money you make, what you’ve invested, how attractive you are, or how much information you can access on the Internet. No Exemptions. Your quality of life is a function of how you choose to spend that time.
2. Some things cannot be delegated, and some things can. Question: Is delegation a privilege reserved for the elite? Answer: Hardly! Did you or your friends ever receive an allowance for doing chores around the house? That’s “parental delegation.” I learned the power of delegation from my parents, who were not wealthy or elite. Did you notice your dad never paid you to go fishing or to play golf for him? Everyone can learn to delegate to one degree or another.

The Quality of Life Enhancer™ is designed to help you keep financial management in perspective. In the example you see six categories down the left side of the grid. Feel free to customize these for yourself they’re not set in stone. Yet I’ve chosen them because in workshops on this subject, I’ve discovered that people can usually agree that these six are more important than money. The rest of the grid is pretty self-explanatory.

Roy Disney once said, “When your values are clear, your decisions are easy.” I’d have to add that when your values are clear and you know what you need to do to experience them – and you realize there are only a finite number of hours in a day – the decision to delegate what you can is easy. Nobody wastes a life days, weeks, months, or years at a time. It’s fifteen minutes here. a half-hour there. a few hours occasionally. that are easily wasted. I strongly encourage you to consider delegating what you can and focusing your time and energy on what’s important to you. Maybe you can find time for some of the activities you include on your Quality of Life Enhancer™ Worksheet by delegating your financial affairs.

To complete your own worksheet, either using the same “Life Qualities” as I’ve provided or substituting your own list, fill in the left column first. Then check yes or no under the “Delegatable?” column, determine how many hours a week you’d like to spend on these qualities, and choose a few activities you’d do. So often we make choices about how we’ll spend our time unconsciously, and this worksheet is designed to help you make conscious choices.

Author Wayne Dyer is famous for writing about his work with people with terminal illnesses. Perhaps his most quotable remark has been that none of those people, confronted with their final days, said they wished they’d spent more time in the office. It’s hard to imagine that they would have said they wished they’d spent more time reading financial magazines, surfing financial Web sites, and checking their stock performance, either.

What about you? Dyer’s point was that if you wouldn’t choose to squander your last week, why would you throw away any of your time? Financial wisdom could be defined as being able to distinguish between what the media, financial companies, and economic information sources try to convince us is absolutely critical from what actually contributes to having a great life.

Here are some things to consider:

• Do you know what a P/E ratio is but not an HDL/LDL ratio?
• Do you know many stars your mutual fund has, but have no idea about your body fat percentage?
• Are you more likely to read Money magazine this week than the Bible, Koran, or some other great text?
• Will you spend more time this week watching financial shows on TV than meditating or praying?
• Did you using more proxy cards for your stock and mutual funds than birthday cards for your friends and family?
• Will you spend more time connected to the Internet than to your friends, children spouse, or parents?
• Do you check your investments daily but not floss daily? (I know that seems silly, but I recently read that if you floss every day, you can add 6.5 years to your life.)

Since we don’t know what we don’t know, it’s possible that you’re not even aware of how much better life would be with a shift in how you spend your time. If there’s one thing I absolutely want to get across to you in this chapter, it is that if spending time on your finances is drawing you away from what’s really important, seek help. In the next few chapters you will learn how to discern the difference between legitimate financial advisors and those who are just product salespeople. So don’t allow any uncertainty you may have about where or how to find an advisor get in the way of a healthy assessment of whether you ought to seek one.

What’s next?

Look again at your Financial Road Map®. If it’s still blank, you probably need some help. If your Financial Road Map® is complete you may want help creating and implementing a strategy. If you’ve decided you are a Do-it-yourselfer, you must begin educating yourself. Start by reviewing the Web site summarized in the sidebar on pages 66-69 to get a complete picture of all the subjects you need to master. Then I suggest you begin to methodically check each of them off your list. Attend seminars, read books, amass a list of reliable online sources. Basically, it’s off to school for you to become a truly competent Do-it-yourselfer.

If, on the other hand, you are a Collaborator or Delegator, you have a different kind of research to conduct. It will be less time consuming by far, but no less important. You must find for yourself a Trusted Advisor.

Every time I venture past the news stand at the grocery store, I can’t help but notice financial magazines which sport articles such as titles as these. Who hasn’t been bombarded by flyers, either in the mail or newspaper, luring us to a financial workshop coming to our area? You know the kind, a flyer that contains some really scary phrases such as:

• “What if Everything You Knew About Living Trust is Dead Wrong?”
• “Educational Safe Money Workshop”
• “Safe Solutions for Uncertain Times”
• Or my personal favorite: “Bulletproof Your Finances.”

No matter what form it’s in, this is known as “Financial Pornography”. So what is Financial Pornography and why should we avoid it like the plague?

What is Financial Pornography?

Let’s start with the basics: Webster’s defines pornography as: “The depiction of acts in a sensational manner so as to arouse a quick intense emotional reaction.”

Is that not the same response so‐called financial professionals and others want from us? When we hear statements such as: Three Ways to Double Your Money or Ten Hot Stock Picks for 2009, or when we see a flyer in the newspaper for a free senior workshop, do they “arouse a quick intense emotional reaction” in us?

Columnist Humberto Cruz summarizes it well.

“I call it financial pornography. It titillates and excites but gives no lasting pleasure. Succumb to it, and it could actually be hazardous to your financial health. I am talking about all those alluring cover headlines from financial magazines, all the “hot tips” from the supposed market experts dispensing their eagerly sought but often contradictory advice all day long on cable TV. Not to mention the thinly disguised infomercial, in which some financial planner buys air time from a radio or television station, then spends half the show asking listeners and viewers to call his office for an appointment.”

If we tweak Webster’s definition of pornography just a bit, we can offer the following definition. Financial Pornography: “The depiction of investment and/or financial information in a sensational manner so as to titillate or arouse a quick intense emotional reaction.” So what’s the big deal about Financial Pornography? Why should we avoid it like the plague – even if we get a free lunch out of the deal?

What are the Dangers?

Individuals or companies that resort to tactics such as Financial Pornography, use it to make their victims feel guilty about failing their families if they don’t buy their products, or scare them with bleak stories about how bad their future would be if they didn’t take action right now.

You know the drill: If they can make us feel scared enough, guilty enough, or stupid enough, chances are – we’ll buy whatever they’re selling.

The danger lies in what we do with this pseudo‐financial advice. Not only can it distract us from achieving our financial goals, it can overwhelm us with negative feelings which can cause us to “shutdown” to any advice from a competent professional. Or worse yet, we may give in to our intense emotions and buy a product or service that may not necessarily be suitable. The emotional / physical impact on a person can be significant too.

Recently, I met such an individual. He was telling me that he was a former Day‐Trader. (Day‐Traders often live on Financial Pornography.) I asked him, “How’s your heart?” He looked at me with wide eyes as if he’d seen a ghost. Instantly, he lifted up his shirt to reveal a 12 inch scar running the length of his torso! As it turns out, he had major heart problems. When asked when he had the surgery, he mentioned that it was around the same time he was a Day‐Trader. He readily admitted to the huge amount of stress he endured as a Day‐Trader, glued to the television and internet, ready to jump from one investment to the next. Now, I’m not a doctor. But do you think that all of this was a coincidence? Hmmm…

How can I protect myself?

What’s the best way to protect ourselves from Financial Pornography? The same way a person might avoid literal pornography: look away! Make a conscious effort to divert your eyes and ears. This is not always easy. We are surrounded by advertising on a daily basis. We hear it on the radio, we see it on television, and our well meaning friends and loved ones may unwittingly disperse it as well. It’s as if the air around us is permeated with it.

If you’re a financial Do‐it‐yourselfer, it’s imperative that you recognize Financial Pornography for what it truly is. How can you do that?

About a hundred years ago when I worked at a bank, we were trained to spot counterfeit money. Did the training involve handling phony bills to learn how to detect them? No – we worked with the real deal. By doing so we could rapidly count large sums of money, and if a counterfeit bill was inside the bundle, we could pick it out by just by the way it felt. That’s how well we knew money!

Likewise, we need to know the “real‐deal” when it comes to the financial information and advice we choose to pay attention to. Better yet…

If you do have questions and really need help, why not find someone you trust to get your financial advice from? If we trust a competent professional we will follow their advice without them having to resort to these tactics.

How can you find a true Trusted Advisor?

In his book, “Values‐Based Financial Planning – The Art of Creating an Inspiring Financial Strategy” author Bill Bachrach offers this advice: “…being a Trusted Advisor… means that the advisor has to actually earn and maintain the trust of the client. In your search for the right person, you may encounter three types of individuals: the “scientific” salesperson, the so‐called consultant (who is actually a salesperson pretending to be a financial planner), and the genuine article: the trustworthy and competent advisor.

It’s unfortunate that they don’t hang out a shingle to let us know which group they fall into. Their titles are no indication, either. Stockbroker, insurance agent, financial planner, financial advisor, financial consultant, estate counselor, CFP, CFS, CIMU, CLU, ChFU: none of these labels is a clue. Neither is the big‐name company they might represent. So you must assess each individual based on a set of characteristics and, ideally, recommendations from a friend, family member, or another advisor. The Trusted Advisor rarely advertises, makes cold calls, or direct markets, so you are most likely to find one by referral.”

The Bottom Line

Financial Pornography is vile and dangerous. It distracts us from reaching our goals. It wastes time that should be spent doing things we care about. Things such as: nurturing our relationships with loved ones, pursuing personal interest, and enriching our health. Train yourself to avoid it altogether. If it’s a good fit for you, find a true Trusted Advisor. Implementing these simple suggestions will greatly improve your quality of life.

P.S. My overly‐zealous attorney insists that I tell you: “No portion of this article shall be construed as investment advice.” Enjoy! JH