Ask ten people if they have a financial plan and most will point at something: a 401(k) statement, a spreadsheet from 2019, a binder an advisor handed them once. Ask what they should do first, this month, and the room goes quiet.
That quiet is the problem. Not a lack of information. A lack of order.
So I built a plan that gives you the order, and I made it free.
What it is
The Napkin Plan is a financial plan you build yourself in about two minutes. You type in a few numbers: what you earn, what you spend, what you have, what you owe, and when you would like work to become optional. It runs in your browser. There is no signup and nobody calls you afterward.
What comes back is not a pie chart. It is an order of operations:
What to fix first. The one or two things that matter more than everything else right now.
What can wait. The things you have been worrying about that are actually fine.
How far along you are. One honest sentence, with the number behind it.
Then it draws the whole thing on a napkin you can save, print, or stick on the fridge.
If an idea does not fit on a napkin, it is probably not an idea yet.
Why two minutes is enough
A full plan takes weeks because it has to be precise. Precise about taxes, about the business, about what happens to the kids if something happens to you.
But precision is not what most people are missing. Direction is. Someone with no emergency fund does not need a Monte Carlo simulation. They need to hear “this first.” Someone sitting on two years of cash does not need a lecture on budgeting. They need to hear that the cash is the problem.
A handful of honest numbers is enough to get the direction right. That is all the Napkin Plan tries to do, and it does it with the same engine I use for paying clients.
What it will not do
It will not tell you which fund to buy, how much to convert to a Roth this year, or what to do with your stock options. Those answers depend on details a two-minute tool cannot see, and pretending otherwise would be the kind of advice I have spent twenty years warning people about.
So the plan tells you what it could not see in your case. If you own a business, hold company stock, or have a big change coming, it says so, and points you to the page that covers it.
It is education. It is not individualized advice, and it says that on the page.
Start with who is steering
Before the numbers, the plan asks nine quick questions about how you decide, what fear does to your decisions, and what the money is for. You can skip them. I would not.
The numbers tell you where you stand. Those nine taps tell you who has been driving. Most plans fail at the second part, which is why The One Look is one of the first systems in my book: open the thing you have been avoiding, once, just to see it.
One question to sit with this week: if someone asked what your next money move should be, could you answer in one sentence? If not, that sentence is two minutes away.
As always, if you want to talk any of this through, the door is open. Genti