If your financial plan ever came in a 40, 50, or 60-pageleather-bound binder, you already know what happened to it. It went on a shelf. It looked impressive. And it was probably out of date within six months.
That’s the starting point for this conversation: what if you burned that binder — what would actually be worth keeping? Inspired by Carl Richards’ book The One Page Financial Plan, we dug into what genuinely belongs on a single page, and why most of what fills those thick planning documents doesn’t need to be there at all.
Asprawling financial plan tends to deliver two things: a sense that “the workhas been done,” and a way for an advisor to showcase effort. What it doesn’tdeliver is something you’ll actually revisit. Life — and your goals — changefaster than a static document can keep up with. The moment it’s printed, in areal sense, it’s already starting to go stale.
The bigger shift is in how you think about planning itself. It’s not a document you receive once. It’s an ongoing process — ongoing conversations, revisiting different parts of your financial life, zooming back out to see the whole picture, and adjusting as things change. A one-page plan works because it’s built for that kind of living, breathing use — not because it’s shorter for its own sake.
Start with why money matters to you. Not goals yet — purpose. Before anything else, it’s worth getting specific about why you’re doing any of this in the first place. Ask most people “why is money important to you?” and the first answer is almost always some version of freedom or security. That’s a true answer, but rarely the real one.
Push one layer deeper — why does that freedom matter, why does that security matter — and you usually land somewhere much more personal. “I want financial freedom” can turn into “I don’t want to be checking overhead numbers in my head while I’m adjusting a patient” can turn into “I don’t want to become the version of my dad who was never around.” That’s the sentence worth putting at the top of the page — a real statement of financial purpose, not a placeholder.
Then, your goals — or better, your guesses. Carl Richards’ reframe is a good one: instead of “goals,” which can feel heavy and permanent, call them guesses. Where do you think you want to be in six months, a year, five years? Guesses are allowed to change. That takes the pressure off and gets something useful on the page.
A snapshot ofwhere you stand today. A high-level net worth andcash flow picture — assets, liabilities, income — gives you the other half ofthe equation. Once you know roughly where you want to go and roughly where youstand, you can see how big (or small) the gap actually is.
Clear next action items. What needs to happen now to close that gap, and what can sit on the shelf until later? Not every recommendation needs to be tackled at once.
A simple picture of how you’re invested, and why. A short summary of your portfolio composition — real estate, markets, cash, corporate vs. personal accounts — paired with a brief investment mandate, becomes a discipline tool. When markets get scary, or your brother-in-law shows up with a “can’t miss” opportunity, you have something to check back against.
That statement of purpose at the top of the page isn’t just a nice framing exercise— it’s what actually helps you make better decisions in the moment. Picture a tempting opportunity: a fourplex rental property, decent numbers, “pays for itself,” 12% ROI. Easy to get pulled in by FOMO alone. But run it against a purpose built around being present for your family and your patients, and a very different question surfaces: will managing tenants on your weekends move you toward that, or away from it? That’s the real value of having it written down — it gives you something to measure a decision against besides how exciting it feels in the moment.
Rather than one large document with thirty recommendations delivered all at once, we work through a client’s financial life in modules — personal cash flow, corporate cash flow, investments, insurance — meeting regularly and making a smaller set of recommendations at each stage. It’s more manageable, each recommendation gets explained in real time rather than handed over cold, and the plan itself lives and gets updated continuously rather than sitting frozen the day it was printed. The one-page summary is the anchor; the ongoing conversation is where the actual planning happens.
The 60-page plan isn’twrong, exactly — some of what’s in it matters. But most of it doesn’t need tobe delivered as a static document to be useful. If you want a place to start onyour own, Carl Richards’ The One Page Financial Plan is a genuinelyexcellent, quick read — especially if you’re managing this yourself without anadvisor.
Want the fullconversation, including how we handle plan updates without reprinting a new PDFevery time something changes? [Listen to episode 032 of The Chiro Money Show →]
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