The EVOKE Life Planning Process Overview (Alice Lake, ID)
This morning at Alice Lake in the Sawtooth Mountains, it’s quiet and still and gorgeous. After a chilly night, I’m enjoying being here this morning, and I want to talk to you real quick today about a summary of what the EVOKE process is.
How the EVOKE Process Creates Purposeful Hourly Financial Planning
In short, EVOKE is a method and approach to financial planning that I use, championed by George Kinder. The idea is that we want to go beyond just looking at numbers in your portfolio and figuring out how to make the most money. Instead, we move into figuring out what’s the most important thing in your life and how we can make your life meaningful — and make your money have a purpose that’s important for your life.
The Steps of EVOKE
Exploration
First, we’re going to do some exploration. We want to talk about everything that may contribute to a meaningful and fulfilled life for you, with no limits. We’re just going to open your mind and not worry about obstacles or whether it’s possible or not, and really just open up to what’s touching for you — what really inspires you.
Vision
Then we go to the vision phase, where we work on narrowing down these exploratory topics and figure out what it is that we want to focus on. We’re not even really looking 20 years in the future or 10 years in the future. We want to be looking over the next year or so and say, “What is it that’s most important to be getting done in the short term?” We create this focused vision of what we’re going to do.
Obstacles
Next, we look at obstacles — what is it that stops you from doing it, what might get in the way — and make sure we’ve got plans in place to overcome those things. Some of these things may be financial, and some of them may not be. These things that are most important have these obstacles, but we’ll deal with all of them.
Knowledge
Then we move on to the knowledge phase, which is your typical financial planning that you’d think of — where we look at the numbers and bring technical expertise to bear, and come up with a financial plan to make these important things happen.
Execution
Lastly is execution — putting things in place and continuing to come back and touch base on what it is that’s important to you in the future as we begin accomplishing things.
Why EVOKE Matters in Financial Planning
We use this process to make sure that what we’re doing is really meaningful and fulfilling to your life, and to make your money have a purpose instead of just being a bunch of numbers. That’s the process that I like to use in financial planning.