Just when you think the stock market has hit bottom, it drops another 1000 points, as it did the week of January 13.

The gloomy financial numbers just don’t stop. Major banks are knocking on the Treasury’s door for a second round of bailout funds. Companies are laying off employees by the thousands. Scandals rock Wall Street to the tune of billions of dollars. Major brokerage firms are bought and sold off like a monopoly game.

With one eye on the grim economic news and the other on a portfolio that drops month after month, there is a tendency to think that everything is out of your control, and that is your first mistake in becoming a successful investor and reaching your financial goals.

Despite all the bad news, you are in control of your financial destiny, and now is the time to recognize it, own up to it, and take charge of it. This process starts with bringing together all your financial information and creating a financial plan so that you can make some intelligent decisions on how to best reach your financial goals.

Creating this plan is essential because it is the document that will be the driving force between the types of investment risk you are most susceptible to – either stock market risk or inflation risk – and how best to allocate your financial resources among various asset classes to address this risk.

For Coffeehouse Investors, a financial plan begins at the beginning; start keeping track of your monthly expenses. How much you save (if you are working), or how much you spend (if you are retired), has, by far, the greatest impact on your long term financial well-being.

Keeping track of your expenses has nothing to do with creating a budget, and everything to do with creating an awareness of how you spend your money – an awareness that allows you to move toward a place in your life where you are not only spending money on people and things that accentuate your life today, but spending it in a manner that parallels your pursuit of longer term financial goals.

At the core of the Coffeehouse investment philosophy is the simple and sophisticated concept of owning low cost index funds – it maximizes your return potential in the stock market over the longer haul. A far greater benefit to this approach is that it allows one to ignore the ups and downs of the stock market and instead address the financial planning issues that matter most of all. You are in control of your financial destiny. Coffeehouse Investors wouldn’t have it any other way.