Every planning conversation comes back to the same question: what needs to change?

The client gave you their data. You've set up their changes to be made. Now you work through each planning module, one by one, looking for the gaps between where they are and where they need to be. Every gap is a potential change to note.

The planning modules are laid out left to right in a specific order: Goals, Investments, Insurance, Taxes, Estate. That order is intentional. You start with goals because you need targets before you can evaluate anything else. Once you know how much they need saved and how much they should be saving, you can look at whether their investments are positioned to get there. Then you check whether they're protected if something goes wrong (insurance), whether they're being efficient with their money (taxes), and whether their documents are in order (estate).

You don't have to go in that order. But if you're building a plan from scratch, it's the natural flow. Each module builds on the one before it.

The theme across all of them is the same: identify what needs to change, then tell the client what to do next. That's the whole methodology, applied one module at a time.