An Overview of Your Wealth-Building Process

The goal of the Individual Investor Wealth-Building Process is to create a comprehensive plan for how to invest. Each part of the process prompts you to think about who you are as an investor, what your preferences are, what you invest in and how and when you’ll review your portfolio.

Individually, each component of the toolbox addresses a single part of your wealth-building process. Putting the components together into a single document gives you a bird’s eye view of your strategy and why you chose it.

The Overview of My Wealth-Building Process worksheet is this summary. You can use it as a guide for making decisions and to discuss what you are doing with your spouse and/or heirs. Plus, should you choose to work with a professional, you can use it to explain to them who you are and how you want to invest.

The worksheet is designed to use information from the entire wealth-building process. In each section, you will see references about where to find the information. If you haven’t gone through the process, we’ve created a preliminary set of challenges to help you on our Learn & Plan page.

PDF worksheet available for download.

Excel worksheet available for download.

Example: Overview of a Young Couple’s Wealth-Building Process

Frank and Susan are a young couple with a three-year-old son and a newborn daughter. Their top priorities are retirement and their children’s college.

They’ve worked through the entire wealth-building process and are using this overview to provide a summary of their overall plan. They plan to look at the worksheet annually when they do a comprehensive review, while Frank agrees to follow the couple’s rules when reviewing his individual stock holdings on a more frequent basis.