Mike Tyson once famously said:
“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” 🥊
You can have the perfect plan. You can think through every detail, anticipate what might happen and convince yourself that you have everything figured out.
Then life happens.
An opportunity appears. A setback comes from nowhere. Something takes longer than expected. Something else happens far sooner than we imagined.
The problem isn’t necessarily that the plan was bad.
It is that life doesn’t always go according to plan.
The Bible puts it this way:
“A person’s heart plans his way, but the Lord determines his steps.” — Proverbs 16:9
This isn’t an argument against planning. It is an argument for understanding its limits.
We should think ahead, make wise decisions and consider where we are going.
But there is a humility required in planning.
We make decisions with limited information about a future we cannot fully control. We can plan the route, but we don’t get to decide everything we encounter along the way.
A good plan prepares you for what you expect. Wisdom prepares you for what you don’t.
Bring Extra Oil 🪔
There is a story Jesus tells in Matthew 25 about ten virgins waiting for a bridegroom.
All ten knew the bridegroom was coming.
All ten carried lamps.
And all ten had to wait.
But there was one crucial difference.
Five brought extra oil.
Five didn’t.
The bridegroom took longer than expected.
And that delay exposed the difference between having a plan and being prepared.
The five who hadn’t brought enough oil suddenly found themselves scrambling to find more. By the time they returned, the wedding feast had begun and the door was shut.
They missed what they had been waiting for.
The five wise virgins didn’t know when the bridegroom would arrive either.
They weren’t better at predicting the future.
They were simply better prepared for uncertainty.
Their advantage was extra oil.
Preparing For What You Cannot Predict
All ten virgins had a plan: meet the bridegroom.
But five recognised that they couldn’t control the timing. So they carried more than they expected to need.
They created margin.
And there is an important lesson here for our finances.
Financial resilience is, in many ways, about creating margin, having something in reserve when life doesn’t go according to plan.
You don’t know when the boiler will break, an unexpected bill will arrive or your circumstances will change. You don’t need to predict exactly what will happen to prepare for the possibility that something will.
That is why we build emergency funds. It is why we insure against risks we couldn’t comfortably absorb ourselves. And, as I discussed last week, it is why you might prepare before your mortgage comes off its fixed rate rather than waiting until the change arrives.
Financial resilience isn’t about predicting the next problem. It is about having enough margin to absorb it when it comes.
Winter Is Coming ❄️
That same idea is captured in one of the most famous warnings from Game of Thrones:
“Winter is coming.”
They knew winter would come. They just didn’t know when.
Waiting until it arrived to prepare would be too late.
Life has winters too.
Some we can see approaching. Others arrive without warning.
Being prepared doesn’t mean expecting the worst. It means recognising that difficult seasons are part of life and giving yourself room to respond when they come.
But there is another side to being prepared.
Sometimes what arrives unexpectedly is something you’ve been hoping for.
An opportunity.
A new role. A business idea. An introduction. A door you didn’t know was about to open.
And those moments don’t always wait for us to get ready.
As motivational speaker Les Brown puts it:
“It is better to be prepared for an opportunity and not have one than to have an opportunity and not be prepared.”
Preparation gives us something valuable in both situations.
The resilience to deal with what we didn’t want and the readiness to take advantage of what we did.
The Compass and the Clock 🧭
The challenge is that we rarely know when either will arrive.
Which is why I like an observation I heard recently:
The compass came before the clock.
The idea is simple:
Direction can matter more than timing.
We spend a lot of our lives wanting to know when.
When will the opportunity come?
When will things change?
When will the plan finally work?
Often, we simply don’t know.
But we can still make sure we’re heading in the right direction.
Develop the skill before the opportunity. Build the savings before you need them. Do the work before the door opens.
You may not control the clock.
But you can control how prepared you are when the time comes.
Leave Some Margin
We cannot predict every emergency, opportunity or change life will bring.
But we can create margin for it.
That is financial resilience: having enough room to adapt when life doesn’t go according to plan.
So plan for tomorrow.
Prepare for the unexpected.
And bring extra oil. 🪔