The Wobbly Wheel

The Wobbly Wheel

Why Good Parts Don't Make a Good Plan

When we owned our office in Steveston I used to ride my bike to the office a lot. Fresh air along the dyke enroute would clear my head on the way in and help me wind down on the way out — cheaper than therapy, and better for the knees than the running that I don't do!

A few years back I wrote about what I call "investment biking" — the financial planning ideas that show up uninvited somewhere around the halfway point of the ride. One of them has stuck with me ever since, and I find myself coming back to it with clients more than almost any other.

The wheel must be true!

A bicycle wheel is a simple thing until you actually look at it. A rim, a hub, and somewhere between twenty and thirty-two spokes, each one tensioned to a very specific tightness. Not "roughly right" — specific. A good wheel builder checks every single spoke against every other spoke, because a wheel isn't strong because each spoke is strong. It's strong because they're all pulling together, in balance, at the same tension.

Loosen one spoke a little and the wheel still looks fine sitting in the stand. It'll even roll. But get it up to speed and it starts to hop, just slightly, on every rotation. Tighten one spoke too much relative to its neighbours and you get the same wobble from the other direction. Either way, the wheel is "out of true" — a beautiful piece of engineering that's quietly working against itself.

Here's the part I didn't fully appreciate until I'd been doing this a long time: a financial plan fails in the same way. Not with one obviously broken piece — with several perfectly good pieces that were never checked against each other.

Your accountant tensions the tax spoke. Your lawyer tensions the estate spoke. Your investment advisor tensions the portfolio spoke. If you own a business, someone — maybe you, alone, at eleven at night — is tensioning the corporate spoke. Every one of them is good at their job. But nobody is standing back with the wheel in the truing stand, checking whether the tension across all of them actually matches up.

And just like the wheel, a financial plan that's slightly out of true doesn't announce itself. It still rolls. Statements still arrive. Taxes still get filed. It's only when you actually put real weight on it — a retirement, a sale of the business, a death, a market drop at the wrong moment — that the wobble shows up, and by then it's a lot more expensive to fix.

A few spokes worth checking the tension on, whatever your situation:

1. Investments and tax — are your investment decisions actually coordinated with your tax strategy, or are they two separate conversations that happen to both be about your money?
2. Retirement income — do you know which accounts to draw from first, and why, or has that decision just never been made explicit?
3. The business, if you have one — are your corporate and personal finances reviewed together, or does one advisor see the company books and someone else sees everything else?
4. The estate plan — does it still match your actual financial plan, or was it built once and never revisited as the rest of the wheel changed?
5. The whole plan — is there anyone whose actual job is to check the tension across all of it, or is everyone just responsible for their own spoke?

None of this means anything is broken. Most of the wheels I true up for clients are made of genuinely good spokes. The gap isn't quality — it's coordination. And the good news is that truing a wheel doesn't mean rebuilding it. It usually just means a careful pass, spoke by spoke, checking each against its neighbours.

That's what our 15-point Coordinated Advice checklist is built to do — a straightforward pass through the major spokes of your plan, so you can see for yourself where the tension holds and where it's a little loose.

[Download the Coordinated Advice Checklist]

Ride safe out there. And if you hear a friendly bell behind you on the dyke, it's probably just me.