Americans want a financial plan for tomorrow and today

My son just finished his junior year of high school – and next summer, he will head off to college and pursue his dreams. This recent realization has caught my wife and me completely off-guard.

It feels like just yesterday that we were playing with LEGOs and toy trucks. As parents, we’ve always been so focused on the now - on school, music lessons, car pools, etc. - that the future fell off our radar, until it arrived. Reacting to the moment, we’re feeling a deep urgency to play catch-up. We’re scheduling as many family experiences as my son and our calendar will allow so we can have as many memories together as possible.

While this planning is exciting, it also feels a little frantic and cobbled together. Life really does move fast. And if you don’t carve out the time to plan for today and the future, it can feel like you’re living in fast-forward. That’s the chief concern I have when I read the results of this year’s Northwestern Mutual Planning & Progress Study.

While nine in 10 Americans (89%) believe that they will recover financially eventually, only one in seven (14%) are actively planning for a long-term goal more than five years out . More than half of Americans describe their financial situation as “in recovery mode,” post-pandemic – and the majority of that group says that they are in the early-to-mid stage of their way back.

These statistics make one thing evident: to be relevant, the financial services industry must help people plan for today and tomorrow.

Financial services has traditionally focused on the long term: providing clients with access to investments to grow their wealth over the arc of a lifetime. That focus solely on the long-term future lacks relevance to the American experience. Many individuals and families need sound advice on how to address what’s in front of them right now before they can imagine the decades ahead.

Especially in this time of transition, people’s short-term goals shouldn’t get the short shrift from the financial services industry. What’s clear is that consumers need us to help them navigate their world today – and their financial lives 10, 20, or 30 years from now.

Americans cannot truly prepare for the long-term future unless they have a plan for today, too. Financial plans need to be more flexible, modern and understandable. Clients need to see where they are and where they want to be, so they’re engaged and ready to take action. They need a view of their investments, savings, bills, debts and more to see how much they can comfortably spend – and understand what might happen if they experience some kind of life event along the way.

At Northwestern Mutual, we’re different because we help our clients do much more than accumulate wealth and prepare for retirement. Our mission is to help clients build a lifetime of financial security. Our company was originally built to help clients address their lifelong wealth accumulation and insurance needs, but today, we’ve evolved – because we know that life is happening now, not just in our golden years. Whether it’s helping clients to fund emergency savings accounts, save for a wedding or a first house, planning financially to have a baby and more – all of these dreams are happening in the now, and each goal can have an outsized impact on the long-term future if it’s not planned for early on.

This is just one of the ways our clients can visualize their progress on the path to achieving their dreams.

That’s why we’re pairing clients with expert advisors and the digital tools they need to help them visualize and organize their entire financial lives. And, uniquely, we’re helping them to see if they can reach these goals even if life takes a turn. For example, today, our advisors are helping their clients understand how much they should save each month to accumulate cash for an emergency fund and a mortgage down payment. They’re also talking about ways to protect their clients’ ability to pay for that mortgage down the road, even in the most difficult circumstances created by a job loss, injury, illness, or passing away unexpectedly.

These are the conversations that will enable Americans to meet their “financial recovery” needs and create long-term plans. This is the comprehensive financial planning experience that clients deserve from their financial planning partner, enabling them to live life in the moment, not moment-to-moment.

As for my wife and me, we’re doing our best to make memories with our son with the time we have left before college. So far, our hurried plans are to surf the waters of Lake Michigan. Yes indeed – you can find places to surf on the Great Lakes, and the Mitchell family plans to ride as many of these waves as we can this summer. But, as we think about the months ahead, we're also starting to consider bigger, longer-term plans with each other before schedules and life get in the way.

What choices are you making to plan further ahead, logistically and financially? Let me know.?