Is Spring Cleaning the Missing Step in Holistic Financial Planning?

Cleaning out a garage means pulling everything off the shelves, putting it all in the center, and deciding what actually still serves you. That's exactly what's missing from most households' financial lives, Asset-Map Founder & CEO H. Adam Holt argues in the video above — and it's exactly what holistic financial planning is supposed to fix.

The Garage-Cleaning Analogy

Cleaning out a garage means taking everything off the walls and shelves, putting it all in the center, pulling out what needs to be donated, trashed, or recycled, and being diligent about only putting back what still serves you. Most financial lives never get that same treatment.

Applying It to Financial Planning

There's rarely a moment when clients put all of their financial stuff on the table at once and decide what fits, what's outdated, and what needs to go. Accounts, policies, and old decisions tend to just accumulate in place, reviewed one at a time if they're reviewed at all — never as a whole picture.

What Advisors Find When Clients Clean House

When advisors finally create that moment, they consistently uncover idle capital, ineffective investments, inappropriate insurance, and structural issues that have gone unreviewed for years. That's the real work of holistic financial planning: not reviewing pieces in isolation, but seeing the whole picture at once.

Matching Inventory to Intentions

Rebuilding a closet or a garage doesn't mean putting everything back exactly where it was. The same is true here — holistic financial planning means making sure a client's current inventory matches their current intentions, not just their old habits. Advisors who haven't run an Asset-Map on themselves yet should start there: spring clean their own financial picture first, then bring that same clarity to every client conversation.

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Full Video Transcript

Do you know what I did this weekend? I cleaned out my garage. What I did is I took everything from the walls, from the shelves, I put it all in the very center. I took the stuff that I was getting rid of, I took it out of the garage. I knew that needed to be donated and/or trashed, maybe even recycled or gifted.

I took everything else, I cleaned the whole place, and I put back only the stuff that served me, that I'll use again, and I was very diligent about it.

Now, think about that from a financial planning standpoint. There's very seldom times when we put all of our financial stuff on the table and decide what serves us, what doesn't fit, what needs to be replaced, and of course, what needs to go.

The reality is that when we have this opportunity to do this as financial professionals and help people organize their financial closet, we get a lot of opportunity to find idle capital, ineffective investments, inappropriate insurances that have to be reviewed, and of course, a lot of other structural changes that probably need attention.

Think about it this way. If you're rebuilding your closet or your pantry or your garage, as I did, you might not put everything back the same place it wound up, and that's a really important aspect of financial planning — to make sure that your current inventory matches your current intentions.

So be thoughtful about this. If you haven't done an Asset-Map on yourself, now is the time. It's spring cleaning. Do this for yourself, do this for your clients, and let's clean up those financial closets.