Have you ever been on a road trip, thinking you’re heading in the right direction only to realize that you made a wrong turn one hundred miles back? It can happen to the best of us, and it can happen in areas of our lives other than just driving. It’s why it’s so important to have benchmarks as a way to measure that you’re on the right path. We like to suggest that you run your finances similarly to how a business would: setting benchmarks that can be compared to other companies in the same industry.

However, many individuals don’t have these benchmarks. The most you can do is to look at how much you have in the bank or your investment accounts or if your investments did better than the S&P 500 for the last quarter or year. But you don’t know how to bring it all together; you don’t have a road map to tell you where you are or a whole view of your finances like a well-run company would. Individuals often don’t understand the principle of compounding or utilizing tax plans for their benefit.

So what does all this mean? When you make uninformed financial decisions, whether it’s because you’re in a hurry or you don’t really understand the ramifications, you can wind up creating a sort of financial domino effect that affects you in ways you don’t foresee and eventually leads you one hundred miles in the wrong direction. It’s this reason why I chose to be a wealth advisor: I wanted to transform lives in the way that having this knowledge transformed mine. Growing up as a baker’s son, I saw a profession in which most people worked until they were seventy or older. I saw that I could help other people make better financial choices so they could have the same thing that I eventually achieved: to be financially independent by age forty-eight and able to do whatever I wished in life beyond that. I can help find the suitable benchmarks to guide you on your financial journey.

Your financial journey also doesn’t only include large sums of money; it’s every decision that you make in your financial life—whether it’s going out to dinner, deciding to buy an insurance policy, buying or leasing a car, paying down a mortgage faster, hiring more employees, expanding your operation, buying another business, or buying more equipment. All of these choices will have an effect on your Wealth Building Formula®, your current and future cash flow, and the way you will live now and in the future. It’s important to be aware of your choices, educated about the effects of your decisions, and have ways to check your choices to ensure that you are on the right path to financial independence.

For more information about setting your own personal benchmarks, visit www.tswealth.com.