Your One-Page Plan and Your Next Three Moves
Okay. This is the last lesson in "Money and the People You Live With," and honestly it's the one I think matters most, because it's where all the other lessons either turn into something you do or turn into something you nodded at and forgot by Tuesday.
So we're making one page. Just one. And then we're picking three moves off it, because you don't have to fix it all at once.
Why one page
You've got a lot of pieces by now. Your yearly spending number. Your sunday-best target. A Roth open, maybe, with something small in it. Some idea of automatic vs. by-hand. Fees you checked and mostly decided not to worry about. And now a plan for talking to whoever you live with about all of it.
That's a lot of pieces sitting in different lessons in your head. A one-page plan just puts them in one place so you can look at it in five minutes instead of trying to remember six lessons.
I want you to write this by hand. Not because typing is wrong, but because a page you wrote yourself, in your own handwriting, feels like it belongs to you in a way a spreadsheet doesn't. You can transfer it to a spreadsheet later if you want. Write it by hand first.
What goes on the page
Keep it simple. Six lines, roughly:
- My yearly spending number (from a few lessons back)
- My sunday-best retirement target (25 times that number, give or take)
- What I'm contributing now (to a 401k, a Roth, whatever you've got)
- What my employer matches, if anything, and whether I'm getting all of it
- Where my money sits (which accounts, roughly what's in them)
- One sentence about the conversation with my spouse or partner — did you have it, when's the next one, what you agreed on
That's the whole page. It's not supposed to be impressive. It's supposed to be true.
Now pick three moves
Here's the thing. A one-page plan that just sits in a drawer doesn't do anything. So before you leave this lesson, I want three moves written at the bottom of that page. Not ten. Three.
For most people, in this order:
Move one: get the full match. If your employer matches and you're not getting all of it, that's your first move, before anything else. Full stop. It's free money and I don't say that about much.
Move two: automate something, even small. If you've been doing your Roth contribution by hand every month, set up the automatic transfer. If you haven't opened anything yet, that's move two instead.
Move three: pick a date for the money talk, or the follow-up money talk. Not "someday." An actual date on the calendar.
If those three don't fit your situation, pick your own three. But write them down as actions, not intentions. "Increase my 401k contribution by 1%" is a move. "Think about saving more" is not a move, it's a feeling.
A confession about standing up here
I'll tell you something. I almost didn't teach this class at all.
I'm not a crowd person. The idea of standing in front of a room of people made my stomach turn, genuinely, for weeks before the first session. I kept thinking of reasons it was a bad idea.
But I kept coming back to those three years at Rockwell where I wasn't getting my full match, because nobody had explained it to me and I hadn't thought to ask. I felt a little sick when I finally read the plan document and understood what I'd left on the table. And I thought, somebody should've just told me that in plain language, sitting in a room, before I had to find out from a document.
So I said yes to teaching this, even with my stomach doing what it was doing. If you're sitting there thinking your plan isn't sophisticated enough, or you're behind, or you should've started this five years ago — I get it. I was the person who didn't open the envelope. This whole class exists because of that.
A word on fees and checking your work
Once you've got the plan written, it's worth spending ten minutes logging into whatever accounts you have and just confirming the numbers on your page match reality. Not obsessively. Just once, so the page is accurate and not a guess about a guess.
If you spot a fee you don't recognize, write it down and look it up later. Don't panic about it mid-lesson. We covered what's worth chasing and what's internet noise a few lessons back, and that still holds.
Before next time
Bring your one-page plan next time, even messy, even in pencil. We're going to do something with it in the last module, and it works a lot better if the page actually exists instead of living in your head. 💛