Just getting started on a financial plan can be difficult when you sift through investment options and the variety of planning items that need to be tackled. Most of us don’t have a background in finance or the time to dig through the fine print that many investments include, and it leads to a lot of people just putting a plan to the side.

Your finances don’t have to be complicated and that’s where a good advisor can become your best ally.

In this episode of Money Wisdom, Joel Johnson helps you take a deep breath and get a better hold of finances by simplifying the areas that give people the most trouble. The first places to start are simple but might take a little time: gathering all of your investments into one place and then organizing those statements. Joel will go into more detail about each of these two steps in the podcast and share some reasons why this can be a huge help.

After you’ve done those two things, the next step is identifying some of the key areas that overwhelm people. There are three specifically that we’ll run through on the show, but we’ll also talk about the solutions that exist. Not only does The Money Map provide this, but Joel Johnson also has strategies that he uses with each client each day that he explains in more detail this episode.

The confusion isn’t just in the details. There are plenty of half-truths that get shared when it comes to finances. Making sure you understand how these common principles affect you personally is the key to leveraging them to your benefit. Have you heard these things before:

• Don’t sweat your losses, the market always goes up in the long run. Over the long run yes, but do you know why this might not matter to you?
• Fees in your portfolio are less than 1%. That might be true but are there additional costs associated with your investments?
• Interest rates are so low, it’s better to invest than pay off your mortgage. How accurate is that?
• Reduce your risk by shifting from stocks to bonds. A traditional way of thinking might not be completely true today.

Being aware of these half-truths will also clear up some of the complexities as well.

Here’s a full list of the main topics on this episode of The Money Wisdom podcast (Just click on the timestamp to jump to the specific clip):

0:42 – Fun Fact of the Week

3:10 – Beauty of Simplicity and How to Make Financial Structure Less Complicated

6:49 – 3 Areas That Overwhelm People

9:27 – Strategies Joel Uses to Bring Simplicity to Clients

11:42 – Explaining How the Money Map Process Assists in This

14:45 – Mailbag Question on mutual fund returns

16:20 – Mailbag Question on getting spouse involved in finances