Map 3 - Helping Others
What do you want your money to do for other people?
Financial planning is not only about what clients want their money to do for themselves. For many people, helping children, grandchildren, wider family or causes they care about is an important part of what their accumulated wealth is ultimately for.
Yet these conversations can move too quickly towards tax, gifting allowances, trusts and estate planning. Map 3 deliberately starts somewhere else.
It begins with the people.
Who might the client want to help? What would they like that help to achieve? Why does it matter to them? Is there a need now, something they can foresee in the future, or simply a desire to share some of their wealth during their lifetime?
The Map then develops the conversation across the family. For each possible piece of support, the adviser can explore who, what, why, roughly how much and roughly when. These are not commitments and they do not need to be precise. The purpose is to understand the client's intentions well enough for them to become part of the wider financial plan. That may also uncover more difficult questions. Should children be treated equally, or according to their circumstances? What might the client want to do for grandchildren? Would they rather see their family benefit during their lifetime than leave everything on death? How comfortable are they actually giving money away?
Only once that picture begins to emerge do the technical questions become useful. Affordability, cash-flow modelling, taxation, trusts and estate planning can then help determine whether and how those intentions might sensibly be achieved, rather than deciding what the intentions should be.
The wider 6-Map approach describes Map 3 as keeping the family lens open and exploring family support, education, security and philanthropic views.
The aim
Map 3 creates a simple picture of the financial help the client may want to provide during their lifetime, while leaving room for those intentions to change. It moves the conversation from: “How much can I give away?” towards the more useful question: “What do I want my money to do for the people and causes that matter to me?”
From there, the planning can begin. My main change from the article draft: this is intentionally less argumentative and more explanatory. It introduces what Map 3 does, why it exists and how it fits into the six-map process, leaving fairness, affordability and the psychology of giving for the separate articles.