What Can an Escape Room Teach You About Financial Planning?
When you truly trust the people you work with, you aren’t afraid to be locked up with them, at least for a little while. At Hilltop, we recently put our mutual trust to the test and went to an escape room for a little bit of team building.
If you don’t know what an escape room is, I should explain: the host locks you in a room, and you escape by finding clues, solving puzzles, and answering riddles. (Of course, there’s a panic button that lets you out in a hurry – as our host explained, the fire marshall frowns on locking people in.) This was an exciting and fun-filled experience, and after we finished, I couldn’t help but see some parallels with financial planning:
Work together and use everybody’s skill set
During our escape room experience, Brittany, the team’s math major, deciphered one particular clue pretty quickly. But she had to explain it to the rest of us a couple times before we understood what she had done. Everybody on the team made a unique and necessary contribution.
The Financial Planning Lesson: You need a team working for you. Hire a planner, and make sure your planner has a team. This of course can be the planner’s own team, with both advisors and operations specialists like we have at Hilltop. But the team should also include other professionals – including accountants, attorneys, therapists, consultants – to advise you on the legal, tax, and psychological impacts of your decisions. Let all the members of your team play to their expertise.
Verbalize what you see
In an escape room, a puzzle and its solution often become clearer when you say it out loud. We Hilltoppers did a lot of chattering in the escape room.
You will not solve your problems without identifying them first. A critical early step in financial planning is analyzing your personal risks and opportunities. Working with an financial planner, you can explicitly recognize the strengths and weaknesses of your progress toward your goals. This makes it much easier to address any shortcomings.
Follow the rules, but don’t be afraid to take things apart
Our escape room had cute little pink stickers on things so we knew what wasn’t a part of the game. These stickers basically gave us a roadmap of the props that previous escapers had tried to break.
There are well established templates and normative rules for building wealth and planning for the future. But be creative. Question your assumptions. In the past, it might have made sense to use all of your free cash flow to maximize Roth IRA contributions, but perhaps a Health Savings Account is a better option now. Don’t just assume you need to do what other people have done; you may need to take a different path than your neighbor or your savvy uncle.
Ask for hints – getting help is NOT cheating
In our escape room experience, we were allowed three hints. We used them all and didn’t wait until the last 5 minutes, which would have been too late to help.
Work with someone who will give you objective, expert advice on your situation. You should at least get a second opinion on your planning from somebody who can see things more objectively than you can, even if it’s that uncle. If you hire a financial planner, we recommend looking for one certified as a CFP®. We also should emphasize asking for help early - the sooner you get advice, the greater impact it can have in your life.
Have a plan, but be prepared to roll with the punches
Going into the room, we already knew we wanted to collaborate and listen to everybody’s ideas. But we also had to be adaptive. Some things that initially looked like clues turned out to be useless wastes of time, diversions.
I’m sure the question you’re asking right now is whether Hilltop made it out of the escape room in time. I am happy to report that we made it out with 4 minutes to spare! Did you doubt us?
P.S. Let me give a quick plug for Cipher Escapes. If you’re in the Raleigh-Durham area, and looking for a good team building activity or just a fun time with family and friends, look them up!