At Providend, our advisory process begins with ikigai, the Japanese concept of a life worth living. Rather than the four-circle Venn diagram that has spread widely online, we work with the framework developed by Mieko Kamiya, the psychiatrist whose research identified the needs that must be met for a person to feel that their life is genuinely worthwhile. Kamiya originally identified seven such needs, with a Sense of Purpose added as an eighth (an extension developed by Nicholas Kemp of Ikigai Tribe, whose work has revitalised Kamiya’s scholarship for a modern audience). If you are not familiar with Kamiya’s work or how we use it, How to Make Life Decisions is a good place to start.
When people work through Kamiya’s Flower carefully, something useful tends to happen. The reflection surfaces what genuinely matters: the relationships worth protecting, the experiences worth saving for, and the kind of life worth building toward. For a while, everything feels clearer.
The natural next step is to turn that clarity into a wealth plan. And this is where things tend to go in one direction.
It naturally points you toward what to add. Turning it on your existing spending takes a little more work.
Why the Flower Tends to Expand the Plan
Kamiya’s needs together make up ikigai-kan, the felt sense of a life worth living. When you reflect carefully on each of them, almost every one has some financial expression.
Some are obvious. If Resonance is central to your ikigai, you will want to think about the relationships you invest in, whether that means visiting family more regularly, contributing to causes you share with people you love, or simply making time and space for the people who matter. If Self-Actualisation matters most, you might want capital set aside for a second career or a creative endeavour you have long deferred. If your ikigai is anchored in a Bright Future, you need near-term milestones, not just a retirement number thirty years away.
What might happen, though, is that each petal generates a new goal or a new line item. The plan grows. The required savings rate goes up. You leave the reflection feeling inspired but also quietly more anxious about whether you can afford the life you have just described.
This is the opposite of what the exercise is for. The Philosophy of Sufficiency does not say, “identify everything meaningful and fund all of it.” It says that enough is defined by what genuinely matters, and that clarity on what matters should make the plan sharper, not wider.
The “Essential” Problem
Part of the difficulty is that by the time most people engage in ikigai reflection, they already have an established lifestyle. And once something is established, it stops being experienced as a choice. As C Northcote Parkinson once wrote, “Luxury, once enjoyed, becomes a necessity.”
And not just extravagant luxuries. Think about the subscriptions that renew automatically each year. The dining habits that formed gradually and now feel like the baseline. The standard at which you host, give gifts, or take holidays. None of these things will appear on your flower. But when you ask yourself honestly whether you could do without them, the answer often feels like “no”, even if they have nothing to do with what you said matters most.
They have been reclassified, in your own mind, from discretionary spending to essential, hygiene factors almost.
This is what happens when you bring any reflective tool to a life that has already accumulated a lot of inertia. The reflection itself is honest. The issue is applying it only forward, to new goals, rather than also backward, to existing habits.
Turning It on What You Already Spend
Before asking which petal a spending item serves, ask whether it is genuinely essential at all. More items will land in the discretionary column than you expect. Once you have that clearer picture, the petal filter becomes more useful. You go through your discretionary spending and ask plainly, which petal it serves. Some items will map clearly to something you identified as central to your sense of a life worth living. Others will not quite map to anything. Those are the ones worth scrutinising.
This is not about cutting for its own sake. It is about finding the spending that is neither essential nor meaningful, the category that tends to be larger than people expect, and redirecting it toward the things that actually showed up on the flower.
Three Categories, Not One
To use the ikigai reflection well, it helps to be precise about what kind of financial intervention each source of meaning actually requires. Not everything that matters is a savings goal, and not everything is a budget line item.
I find that the most useful way to think about it is in three categories.
Cashflow Plan
Some ikigai expressions belong in the cashflow plan as recurring spending. Daily joys, the small rituals that give texture to ordinary life, belong here. So does generosity that flows naturally and frequently: treating family to a meal, regular charitable giving, contributions to the communities you are part of. These need to be planned for explicitly, because they are easy to squeeze out under budget pressure, and yet for many people, they are the most consistently reliable source of meaning in their weeks.
Capital Goal
Other expressions require a capital goal, a lump sum to be accumulated over time. Funding a child’s education at a chosen institution. A meaningful sabbatical. Seed capital for something you want to build after leaving full-time employment. A property in a place that matters to your family. These are discrete events with a price tag, and they belong in the goal-based planning model in the same way retirement does.
Structure
A third category is structural, covering things that shape the design of your portfolio and estate rather than your cashflow or goal list. If Freedom is the dominant petal for you, the plan should make your financial independence threshold visible and tell you clearly when work becomes optional rather than necessary. If meaning is bound up in what you leave behind, the plan needs to be structured to make that possible, whether through how you invest, how you give, or how your estate is arranged. These are not spending items or savings targets. They are architectural questions about how the whole plan is put together.
The reason this categorisation matters is that conflating all three tends to produce a bloated plan. When structural intentions are costed as if they were capital goals, the numbers become intimidating. When daily joys are treated as one-time events, they get under-budgeted and then overspent as the year goes by.
Where the Real Work Lies
The harder part is not identifying what matters. Most people can do that when they slow down enough to try. The harder part is making the trade-off specific enough to act on.
Not “I could save more” as an abstraction, but “what am I currently spending in one area, that when redirected can provide for the cost of the thing I said matters most?” When the trade-off has a face on each side, it is easier to make an honest call.
Done well, the flower does not just tell you what your wealth plan should fund. It tells you what it should stop funding. And that, more often than not, is where the real planning work begins.
This is an original article written by Bryan Chan, Lead of Solutions at Providend, the first fee-only wealth advisory firm in Southeast Asia and a leading wealth advisory firm in Asia.
For more related resources, check out:
1. The Part of Ikigai That No One Talks About
2.Ikigai Insider: The People and Places That Bring Us Resonance
3. The Seven Ikigai Needs – Ikigai Tribe
Through deep conversations with our advisers, you will gain clarity on what matters most in life and what needs to be done to live a good life, both financially and non-financially. Learn more about our investment philosophy here.
