I’m going to toot my own horn today. It’s not really MY horn, but the horn of an industry (financial planning) that I believe does an immense amount of good in the world.

When people hear I’m a financial planner they often respond, “Oh you must be good at math!” I guess I am, but only addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Most of the complexity of my daily work isn’t concerning math, but behavior. Encouraging clients I meet with to make tough decisions about their money, even decisions that seem counterintuitive.

A good plan helps steer behavior toward more positive outcomes. It helps prepare you mentally for the challenges ahead, with a predetermined plan of how to respond to them.

Here are three reasons why I think everyone needs a financial plan.

Things can get scary, which leads to poor decisions

Turbulent markets, a job loss, a large medical expense. The list goes on and on. When things get scary, the “flight or fight” part of our brain kicks into high gear. For ancient hunter/gatherers that used to be a good thing, but when it comes to modern humans making good financial decisions, well, it can lead to mistakes.

The fight response may manifest as “The markets are going crazy. I have to adopt some new system to beat how the market is performing.” The flight response may be “The markets are going crazy. I have to sell everything until this all calms down.”

Unfortunately both of these decisions can lead to trouble. Down markets are usually the worst time to change your investment strategy, and selling everything until the market calms down can lead to missing out during the recovery, not to mention dividends and interest your investments could still be earning if you had stayed put.

Not doing anything when markets are volatile can certainly seem counterintuitive, but examples abound of how passive investors typically beat out investors who think they know better. A financial plan can help you chart a course that you can confidently stick to through thick and thin.

You don’t know what you’re doing

Don’t be offended by this. You have the capacity to learn all the financial concepts you need to, just like I can learn how to fix my car. But I don’t do it. I accept that there are some things out there that I don’t want to commit the time and money to learn because of other life priorities. Instead, I choose to hire people who already know. I’ve done too many stupid things to my car for it to ever be worth my time again.

You may love working on your car, or you may love learning the ins and outs of personal finance. If that’s true then more power to you. But if you’re like most people you have to acknowledge that you only have so much time in a day, and most of us are better off when we concentrate most of our time in a particular trade or profession and get really, really good at a few things.

By creating a financial plan with the help of a professional planner, you can save yourself a lot of time and mistakes, and not have to learn some of the painful lessons that may otherwise come from the school of hard knocks.

Your financial life involves more than you think

Most inquiries I receive are from people looking to retire, so their questions center around how much income they reliably take from their investments. This is an important question, but there are other questions of equal importance that often aren’t considered, for example:

What is an acceptable amount of investment risk you’re willing to take?
How does your social security and any pension benefits play into your income picture? What ways have you explored to maximize these benefits?
What are the tax implications for taking retirement income from your investments? Are there ways to reduce these taxes?
How can you use your investments to plan for future but very significant costs, like long-term health care expenses?
Will you carry a significant amount of debt into retirement? What strategies can be devised to reduce your debt in retirement?
How should you think about life insurance in retirement? Are there certain policies that should be maintained, or should they all be surrendered?
How much of your wealth are you likely to leave to your heirs? Are you comfortable with them receiving your wealth outright, or are there smarter ways to protect it using estate planning tools, such as trusts?

I could write an entire post about how all the financial areas of your life overlap with each other. There is immense value in using a financial plan to see the whole picture of your financial life. It starts by considering your goals and what’s most important to you, then deploying your financial capital in a way that considers all the facets of your financial life–investments, social security, taxes, debt, cash flow, insurance, estate.

Most people need a financial plan. Whether you get my help or the help of another adviser is totally up to you. But I encourage you to acknowledge the value of having such a plan, as you try to plot a course through the inevitable ups and downs of your financial life.