What are you supposed to save for when you don't know what you want?

Google “how to make a financial plan,” and one of the first things you’ll see is a question: What are your goals?

An easy question, no? Buy a house, get married, have kids, retire at 65. Maybe summers in Italy, if you’re feeling ambitious.

Then you’ll give each one a price and a deadline, plug it into a spreadsheet, and then badabing badaboom, your plan is set. Go forth and conquer.

There’s just one teeny, tiny problem: What if you have no idea what you want?

How do you plan for a future you can’t even imagine? Maybe you know what you want in the abstract. You want to be happy, or secure. You want to have enough money to stop worrying about money. Unfortunately, none of those things comes with a set price tag, which makes it feel impossible to plan for.

And the future itself isn’t exactly inspiring confidence. The world feels like it’s moving 100 miles per hour and everything feels so uncertain, so how could you possibly plan for retirement 30 years away when you don’t even know what your life is going to look like in one year?

I think about this constantly as a financial planner. We spend an enormous amount of time talking about how to execute a financial plan: how much to save, where to invest, which accounts to open, what to optimize, and so on. But we spend considerably less time asking whether the life we’re optimizing for is one we actually want.

Money is a choose-your-own-adventure. There’s no single right path (There are definitely wrong ones, though). When you skip the initial step, you usually end up in one of two places:

• You adopt the goals you’re supposed to want. A house, a retirement age, some arbitrary net worth number, because that’s what responsible adults do.
• You don’t plan at all. You’ll get serious about money once you’ve figured out your life.

You don’t need to know what your life looks like in 10 or 20 years to make good decisions today. You need to know what you want your money to make possible. That takes a different kind of plan. Instead of organizing your money around destinations, we’re going to organize it around direction, flexibility, and the ability to change your mind.

In today’s paid issue:

• The four questions I ask before setting any money goal
• Why your biggest money goal probably isn’t the real one
• The three jobs your money should be doing when you don’t know what you want
• How I’d split $1,500 a month if I had no idea what I wanted next
• The case for budgeting money to spend on figuring it out