Financial Planning For Attorneys
WHY WE DO WHAT WE DO
You Need to Start Planning for Retirement Now!
Every career must end. Some careers end well. Some careers end badly. For a legal career to end well, at the very least the retiring lawyer should be financially secure. To prepare a secure retirement every lawyer should see a certified financial planner, and the firms themselves -- even the largest ones -- should be doing financial planning. Lawyers are paid to be smart and thoughtful. While that is not surprising, it is surprising how few of them plan well if at all for their retirement. Somehow virtually all lawyers seem to put off doing the planning required to make their future a secure one. Doing nothing is hardly a plan -- in fact it often results in a festering sore that only gets worse over time!
Almost all of us graduate from law school with crushing educational loans which seem to take forever to pay off. And then as our careers develop we get involved in living the lifestyle of substantial professionals. Somehow all of this results in a failure to save and a failure to plan. Of course the capstone of any successful career is financial security, and a failure to plan sends the financial security train off the tracks. When we are saving at all, most lawyers “save” by investing in their business or their homes, and not the sorts of liquid assets that provide for retirement.
What should a busy lawyer do? The first thing one should do is learn about financial planning, because after all most of us are in this business for financial success (as a secondary reason to seeing justice done), and many of us are in the business simply for financial success.
Financial planning is a process of meeting goals by managing finances. There are six steps in the financial planning process, and working through these steps one can focus on the current state of affairs and how to navigate the future to reach one's goals. The start of the process of course is gathering up all the information on your current financial situation, setting life goals, establishing a strategy to get from here to there, and implementing it. Every good lawyer knows that putting a plan on paper is the first step to getting the plan accomplished.
A written plan gives direction. A written plan allows one to understand how each financial decision taken changes the other part of one's financial picture. It allows one to view one's financial situation as a whole.
In the spirit of full disclosure the author is a Certified Financial Planner (CFP®), a lawyer, a graduate of the Georgetown LLM tax program, a Chartered Financial Consultant (ChFC), a Certified Life Underwriter (CLU) and a Nevada-certified Estate Planning Specialist.
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