Each end of the year brings the feeling of finding yourself in front of an open card on the table. The path is there, but no one knows exactly what the weather, traffic or road conditions will be like. However, no one decides to travel without a map just because the route involves risks. Planning doesn’t eliminate uncertainty, but it’s essential to prevent it from paralyzing you or causing unnecessary risk.
José Ortega, a 20th-century Spanish philosopher, wrote: “I am myself and my situation.” This expression helps to understand why financial planning is not an attempt to control the future, but a way of acting in it with lucidity.
It’s common for people to come to the end of the year wanting to “plan for 2026” as if it were an isolated event. This brief glance usually generates two equally bad behaviors. Some fall into naive optimism, exaggerating their expectations and underestimating the risks. Others enter a state of waiting, held back by the fear that next year will be difficult. In both cases, the mistake is to view the next year as a final destination, when it is just another step in a long journey.
Planning is not about predicting whether 2026 will be a good or bad year. It’s about making decisions that continue to make sense even if they don’t turn out as planned. This is when your decisions stop being a set of isolated choices and start functioning as a system, a tripod: investment, protection and inheritance.
But a tripod doesn’t hold up just because it has three legs. It also stays upright because it was placed in the right place.
In practice, planning an investment means defining the purpose of the money. In other words, what kind of life should he fund today and maintain over the years.
When this becomes clear, investments are no longer chosen based on their performance over the following year but are now evaluated based on the role they play in the plan.
Planning to protect is not about seeking generic tranquility, but about identifying what cannot fail. What event would dismantle the entire structure if it occurred. This exercise changes the way risk is perceived, because protection stops being a cost and becomes an element of design.
Planning for success is not about anticipating the end, but about ensuring continuity. It’s about reacting calmly and in advance, knowing who is vulnerable if something happens, and how the plan continues to work without improvisation. When this conversation happens early, it is usually simple. When delayed, it almost always becomes costly and controversial.
These three dimensions only work well when they arise from honest questions. Why am I accumulating assets? What can’t go wrong along the way? Who depends on this plan besides me? When these answers exist, many decisions begin to fall into place naturally.
From there is born a responsible optimism. Not the certainty that next year will be good, but the confidence that the plan does not depend on a single year to work. A difficult year does not destroy good planning. A good year doesn’t solve a bad plan. What makes the difference is the consistency of choices repeated over time.
Planning means accepting that the future has risks, but it also has a horizon. And those who see the horizon rarely sit still, waiting for the next year to arrive.
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