An IWP Perspective
At IWP we’ve believed for as long as we’ve been doing this work that money, on its own, is not the point. Two years of data has now given us the evidence to say it out loud.
Most financial planning conversations begin with the same word: goals. What are your goals for retirement? What are your goals for the kids? What’s the holiday house goal, the school fees goal, the superannuation goal?
Goals sound substantial. They’re not. Goals are the surface — the polite, spreadsheet-friendly veneer of an approach that, underneath, treats money as the centre of gravity. Money for money’s sake, dressed up in language that makes it feel personal. The industry has built itself around this framing because goals are easy to fund, easy to measure, and easy to bill against. They are also, in our experience, almost always wrong about what the client actually wanted.
We have spent the better part of a decade building IWP around a different premise. That if you ask someone what their goal is, they’ll tell you about the holiday house. If you ask them who they want to be, what they’re here for, and what they’d regret not doing if life turned out to be shorter than they’d planned — you’ll get a different answer entirely. And the holiday house, if it appears at all, will appear in its proper place: as one expression of a life, not the thing the life is being optimised toward.
We call this Purpose Driven Advice. Internally, we sometimes shorten it to Life First. We borrow openly from George Kinder’s Life Planning method — particularly his framing around freedom, finite time, and the regret horizon — and we’ve layered in our own techniques developed over years of working with Australian families. The order is the thing. Life first. Money second. Money in service of the life, designed to support a person’s values, purpose and direction — not the other way around.
For most of those years the case rested on conviction and on the change we saw in our clients. Conviction is a hard sell in our industry, so two years ago we started measuring.
The Study: Two Years. 135 Clients. Eight Dimensions of a Whole Life.
For two years we have measured what we believe matters. Not just portfolio returns. Not just net worth. The whole of a person’s life, scored honestly across eight dimensions: Career, Emotional, Environmental, Financial, Intellectual, Physical, Social and Spiritual.
The method is straightforward. Each client rates themselves out of five on each dimension. We compare new clients — measured before our work has had time to take effect — against existing clients who have been engaged with our Purpose Driven approach.
If we were just another financial planning firm, the result should be predictable: the financial number moves and the rest stays roughly flat. That’s the signature of a money-for-money’s-sake practice doing its job.
That is not what our data shows.
| Life Area | New Clients | Existing Clients | Difference |
| Career | 3.3 | 3.9 | +0.6 |
| Emotional | 3.4 | 4.0 | +0.6 |
| Environmental | 3.0 | 3.7 | +0.7 |
| Financial | 3.1 | 3.8 | +0.7 |
| Intellectual | 2.7 | 3.2 | +0.5 |
| Physical | 3.2 | 3.9 | +0.7 |
| Social | 3.3 | 3.7 | +0.4 |
| Spiritual | 2.5 | 3.2 | +0.7 |
IWP Life Areas Study, n = 135. Average score per dimension on a 5-point scale.
Read that table again. Slowly.
Every dimension moves. All eight.
The financial uplift is +0.7 — that’s competent advice doing competent work, exactly what a client paying for financial planning is entitled to expect. But look at what sits alongside it.
| Spiritual wellbeing — the deepest, hardest-to-shift dimension of a human life — moved by the same +0.7. From 2.5 to 3.2 on a five-point scale, a 28% lift from the lowest base in the entire dataset. That is not a rounding error. That is people reporting they have found meaning where two years ago they had not. |
Physical health moved +0.7. Bodies are not normally part of a financial planning conversation. Ours apparently are.
Environmental wellbeing — the sense of being at home in one’s life and surroundings — moved +0.7.
Emotional wellbeing moved +0.6 and reached 4.0 out of 5 — the highest absolute score in the entire study.
Career, Intellectual, Social — every single one moves measurably in the same direction.
A financial planning firm should not be able to do this. By any conventional measure, this exceeds the remit of the industry we technically belong to. A goals-and-portfolio practice can move the money number. The other seven dimensions are supposed to be someone else’s territory — the GP’s job, the therapist’s job, the priest’s job, the partner’s job, anyone’s job but the adviser’s.
Our data says they are not someone else’s job. Our data says that when the work is genuinely built around values, purpose and direction — when life is genuinely the lens through which money is examined — every dimension of life responds. The financial number is not the only dial that moves. It may not even be the most important one.
This is not a halo effect. It is not a side benefit. It is the empirical fingerprint of a different methodology doing different work, and it is the result we have spent two years quietly verifying.
Why “Goals” Misses the Point
The deeper issue with the goals framing is not that it’s wrong. It’s that it’s small. A goal is something you tick off. A goal funded is a goal finished — the spreadsheet rebalances and you move on to the next one. Nothing in that loop touches the question of why any of it mattered.
Sit with anyone honestly for long enough and you’ll find the same thing underneath. We are here to leave a mark. We are here to feel that we mattered. We are here to be of use to the people we love and to whatever we believe is bigger than ourselves. Those are not goals. They are the substrate beneath goals — and they are what every spreadsheet, plan and portfolio is ultimately serving, whether or not the adviser ever says so.
A practice that never names this substrate is forced to optimise on the proxies. It picks the holiday house because the holiday house is what the conversation produced. It builds a retirement number because retirement numbers are what the software calculates. The client retires comfortable and the question of whether the life that was funded was the right life never gets asked, because asking it was never part of the methodology.
We think this is why so much of the financial planning industry produces clients who are financially fine and existentially adrift. The plan worked. The life it served was someone else’s idea of a life.
The Research Catches Up
We aren’t the only ones now seeing this. The international research is steadily catching up to what holistic practitioners have been arguing for years.
The Financial Planning Standards Board’s 2023 global study of more than 15,000 people across 15 regions found that 73% of clients working with a Certified Financial Planner reported having interests and involvements that gave their life a sense of meaning and purpose, compared with 64% of those without. The meaning gap, measurable across cultures, speaks directly to what we call the Spiritual dimension.
Schepen and Burger (2022), tracking the same individuals across the Dutch Household Survey from 1995 to 2018, found that working with a financial professional was positively associated with subjective wellbeing within the same person over time — strongest for those who felt least in control of their circumstances. Dew, Britt and Huston, in Family Relations (2012), found that money conflict is the strongest single predictor of divorce, controlling for income and net worth. Robert Sapolsky’s stress-physiology work documents how chronic financial worry activates the same biological systems that drive cardiovascular disease, immune suppression and disturbed sleep — which is to say, financial unease doesn’t stay financial. It seeps into the body.
The published research is increasingly clear that financial advice supports wellbeing. Our two years of data go a step further: when the methodology is explicitly built around purpose, values and life direction — when the order is genuinely life first — the wellbeing gains are not a side effect of the financial gains. They are a parallel and equal outcome. In our data, sometimes a leading one.
What We’ve Always Known
There is a version of this article that frames our findings as a discovery. It would be more dramatic, but it would not be true. We have known this for years. We have known it because we have watched what happens when a person stops asking what should I do with my money and starts asking what is this money for, in the context of who I am trying to become. The change is not subtle. It is a different conversation entirely, and it produces different lives.
What is new is the data. We can now point to a measurable, repeated pattern across 135 clients and two years that confirms what we’ve been telling people for the better part of our careers: align your money to your values, your purpose and your direction, and the financial outcomes look after themselves — and so does almost everything else.
The industry will keep selling goals. We’ll keep asking the harder question.
Life first. Always has been.
- • •
A note on our study: Self-reported wellbeing scores across 135 IWP clients, gathered over two years. Observational data of this kind cannot fully separate the effect of our methodology from the characteristics of clients who are drawn to it. The next phase tracks the same clients over time — the design that lets us isolate the effect of the approach itself. We will publish those findings as the data matures.