User-Friendly Ag Family Financial Planning

Angela Boudro

Guest Blog by Angela Boudro

Although my passion has always been agriculture, I’ve owned (or co-owned) and managed businesses in the restaurant, real estate, construction and agricultural industries. Financial planning for those businesses has ranged from simple handwritten “on-the napkin” predictions to a full Holistic Financial Plan.

Without a question, Holistic Financial Planning has several very valuable advantages over other methods I’ve used. This list isn’t exhaustive, and these aren’t listed in any particular order because each aspect is valuable, but they may have different impacts on your life depending on the circumstances you are currently experiencing.  

Whether you are creating a financial plan for your family, a business, or an organization, Holistic Financial Planning offers additional tools to help you plan not only for financial security, but also for a more engaged team with a better quality of life, while considering the impact your financial decisions have on the environment and ecosystem.

1)     Focuses on values of all team members

In most business, financial profitability gets the most attention. We have bookkeepers, accountants, bankers…but have you ever hired someone to ensure each team member’s individual values are being met and respected? As our children are getting older, it seems we are busier than ever before, and I have come to appreciate more than ever that the first step in Holistic Financial Planning is to revisit our values and our holistic goal. It forces my husband and I (and our kids as they become old enough) to stop and evaluate whether our actions are yielding the life we want to live. There can be a lot of activity without progress if we lose sight of our values.

2)     Encourages conversation with all team members

This is similar to number 1 above, but I wanted to draw attention to another benefit of the Holistic Financial Planning Process. We want to hear and value all team members. For example, in our family we have one child whose interests and passions are unshared by any other family member. Our boys and my husband love planes, so one of our pastures actually has a runway for their remote control planes. However, my daughter loves art, and I’ve noticed recently that while we take family trips to airshows and take the time to roll and seed the runway, it is easy to be too busy to prioritize family trips or time for her hobbies because no one else in the family has that passion. By taking the time at the beginning of the year to prioritize values, we can ensure that time and funds are set aside to honor the things she values.

3)     Helps prioritize investments and create timelines

Move “someday I will” to “this year, in this month, I will spend this much on fulfilling my values/dream/goal.” Someday is not a day of the week, and unless we take concrete steps, life will pass us by without us having taken our dream vacation or building our sewing cabin or buying that piece of machinery that would have saved our back.

4)     Helps us see money spent on the social or environmental realm as investments

 In the financial world, we talk about return on investment and generally, we are only talking about dollars returned for dollars invested. Spending money on non-financial or “soft” things we value can be seen as frivolous or wasteful. However, the Holistic Financial Planning process helps us seek balance between all three legs of the stool, so now we can see that putting money aside for a family trip, a pottery class, new decorations for our home, or a specialized piece of machinery for the farm are investments in our quality of life, even if they don’t directly return money to the farm.

5)     Provides rapid feedback on financial status

Part of Holistic Financial Planning is entering actual numbers every month and comparing them to our planned numbers. Having this feedback can be the difference between small corrections and a major catastrophe. The earlier we can make corrections, the less costly they are and the more time we have to brainstorm new ideas. This isn’t just a good idea financially; it also reduces stress on all members of the management team.

6)     Helps you plan the profit, not just take what is left over

Many business owners gauge their success by their bank account balance at the end of the year. They consider themselves profitable as long as there is money in the account. Unfortunately, this is simply not true and leaves the business incredibly vulnerable. The Holistic Financial Planning process specifically prioritizes profit, and while nothing can guarantee profit, planning for profit first greatly increases the chance of success.

There are many other benefits to the Holistic Financial Planning Process. The process is often taught over multiple sessions, allowing students to consider their own holistic goal and incorporate their own numbers to develop their own Holistic Financial Plan.

We’ll be providing a taste of this process at the 2025 REGENERATE Conference, in Santa Fe, New Mexico on November 5-7,2025, where we’ll discuss using the Gross Profit Analysis to determine which enterprises contribute the most financially to your operation and how to use the decision-making questions to work through complex or difficult decisions. Come learn how Holistic Financial Planning can help you! If you’ve already started your Holistic Management journey, come for a refresher and stay the course!