The College Planning Blog

Hope Is NOT A Plan

Brannon and I were chatting about a client last week and I was commenting about how my client said that, “They were going to wait and see what happened with their financial aid” before they executed our college savings plan. While I was talking with Brannon he said something very interesting. He said, “Hope is not a plan.”

Long after we discussed the client, I kept thinking about what Brannon said….”Hope is not a plan.” If you hang out with Brannon you realize that he’s a really sharp guy. I didn’t think much about what he said at first, but it stayed with me for a while.

Here’s my problem. It seems like no one, and I mean no one wants to take ownership for anything. They don’t plan to do anything. They don’t plan to save, they don’t plan to make money, they don’t plan the next two, three, or four weeks of their lives, let alone the next few years of their lives on this planet.

I don’t mean to get all philosophical or anything but I’ve recently noticed that people have  become completely unable to make a decision in their lives. They are hopeless. They are paralyzed. They are frozen. They just can’t move.

Is it the economy? Is it the uncertainty about the future? Is it the news? I don’t know exactly what it is. But I’ve got a few clients that absolutely refuse to make a decision. Let me give you an example. Three years ago I presented a client with a plan to pay off credit card debt, pay off their car, pay off a credit line, and pay for college for their three kids. Well, the good news is they did part of it. The bad news is that they only took care of half of their cash flow challenges. Guess what they told me? They told me, “We’ll wait to see what happens.”

Well I heard from them yesterday and they are in bad shape. One kid has graduated from college, one is a sophomore in college, and the other is a freshman in college, and THEY ARE COMPLETELY OUT OF MONEY!!! This is AFTER I got a $360,000 bill down to $200,000.

Now they are out of money, the equity in their house is non-existent, their business is in the tank, and they now have to try to borrow the money via PLUS loans. I say try because I’m not sure that they can even borrow the money.

Here’s the irony, if they had just listened and executed the plan….their cash flow would have been LESS than it is now!!!

How about you? Are you hoping for a great 2009?

You better not be! Don’t hope that things will work out. They almost never will work out they way that we want without doing something.

Being aggressive in getting your business taken care of beats out hope every single time.

Make a plan, execute the plan, and make 2009 the best year ever.