What Is Financial Planning? Definition, Meaning and Purpose (2024)

Financial planning is the process of taking a comprehensive look at your financial situation and building a specific financial plan to reach your goals. As a result, financial planning often delves into multiple areas of finance, including investing, taxes, savings, retirement, your estate, insurance and more. As you might expect, a financial planner typically offers financial planning services, though financial advisors often double as planners themselves. To find an advisor who can help you build a financial plan, try SmartAsset’s free financial advisor matching tool.

What Is Financial Planning?

Financial planning is the practice of putting together a plan for your future, specifically around how you will manage your finances and prepare for all of the potential costs and issues that may arise. The process involves evaluating your current financial situation, identifying your goals and then developing and implementing relevant recommendations.

Financial planning is holistic and broad, and it can encompass a variety of services, which we detail below. Rather than focusing on a single aspect of your finances, it views clients as real people with a variety of goals and responsibilities. It then addresses a number of financial realities to figure out how to best enable people to make the most of their lives.

Financial planning is not the same as asset management. Asset management generally refers to managing investments for a client. This includes choosing the stocks, bonds, mutual fundsand other investments in which a client should invest their money.

However, the same professionals who offer asset management services can also offer financial planning. A financial planner is effectively one type of financial advisor. Advisors can earn certifications focused on financial planning, the most notable of which is certified financial planner.

Understanding the Different Types of Financial Planning

A financial planner may offer a variety of services to you. These services will often be considered in concert with one another. This helps the planner put together an overall plan that considers all aspects of your current situation and future aspirations.

Here are eight common services that are generally offered as part of financial planning:

The exact services offered by a financial planner will vary based on the individual. Make sure the financial planner you choose offers the services you need.

What’s Part of a Comprehensive Financial Plan?

The most important thing your financial planner will do for you is right there in their name: put together a financial plan for you and your family.

A financial plan is a complete overview of the steps you’ll have to take to achieve the goals you lay out for yourself. These objectives could include paying for your children to go to college, giving to charity, paying for a comfortable retirement or maximizing the amount of money you pass down to your children.

Your financial planner will help you create a financial plan after talking to you about your goals and needs. Then they’ll engage in a variety of services, described in the section above, to help you achieve your goals.

How to Make a Financial Plan

Here are four key facets of a sound financial plan.

Gauge your net worth: Add everything you own and tally up everything you owe. This includes physical assets like cars and residences, and financial assets like stocks, bonds, IRAs and 401(k)s. The upshot is your net worth. Once you have a sense of what you’ve got, you’ll be in a position to make a plan.

Establish financial goals: Step One in the process is making specific goals. This should be an inclusive, encompassing funding education, meeting healthcare expenses, creating an emergency fund, planning for retirement and creating an estate plan.

Monitor cash flow: This is often the most challenging part of making a financial plan, partly because many of us don’t pay particularly close attention to every dollar and dime we spend and partly because it may not be fun to get up close and personal with your discretionary spending.

Create pathways to each of your financial goals: In some cases that will mean moving money into high-yield savings accounts, which as of June 2023 were offering up to 4.85% APY. In other cases it will mean paying down debt, starting with the highest-cost debt, such as credit card debt. It may also mean adjusting your spending.

How Much Money Do You Need for Financial Planning?

The cost of financial planning depends largely on the advisor you work with and their fee schedule. Advisors often bundle investment advice and financial planning services together, and charge a single fee that’s based on the amount of money you have invested with them – your assets under management (AUM).

In fact, a Kitces survey of more than 750 financial advisors in 2022 found that 62% include the cost of financial planning in their AUM fee. Meanwhile, only 22% of advisors offer financial planning services separately via a single, flat fee. This charge may depend on the complexity of the services you require, but the median cost of a standalone financial plan in 2022 was $3,000, according to the same Kitces study.

Other advisors who offer financial planning may do so on either an hourly basis or as part of the retainer they charge. Rates for hourly financial planning typically range from $220 to $300, while retainer fees range from $2,300 to $6,000, the Kitces study found.

Bottom Line

Financial planning is about looking at all elements of a person’s financial life and coming up with a plan to help you as an individual meet your responsibilities and achieve your goals. It can include a number of services such as tax planning, estate planning, philanthropic planning and college funding planning. You might pay based on an hourly fee, a flat fee or an asset-based fee.

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