If your head is spinning from everything that’s been happening over the summer, you’re not alone. If there’s something 2024 has reinforced, it’s that change is a constant. Now that we’re entering fall––a season that symbolizes change––it’s a good time to review your own plans and adjust as necessary or desired. With that in mind, I think it’s also a good time to reexamine my eight tenets of financial life planning that originally appeared in Your Clients for Life: The Definitive Guide to Becoming a Financial Life Planner. First published 25 years ago, the principles remain as relevant today as they were then––maybe more so!

  1. Life is about change. The purpose of financial life planning is to facilitate successful transitions throughout a client’s life. Planning for a single event––such as retirement, that is probably years into the future––means that your client risks missing out on a lot of great experiences along the way. Financial life planning shouldn’t be based on a single stop, but instead on the entire journey.
  2. Each client’s life is a continuum of unique experiences. There is no single checklist that will work for all your clients because every client is different. Each individual client’s life experiences influence how they perceive and respond to change. Financial life planning recognizes that there are more stages than just “before retirement” and “after retirement.”
  3. Each client’s life course is unique. Life transitions are no longer reliably predictable. For example, many of us are living longer, getting married later in life (or not at all), starting families later (or not at all), and engaging in multiple career changes as a choice (not as a sign of failure). There’s a good chance your clients are following an unconventional life course, whether by chance or by choice.
  4. Your client’s approach to learning is life-centered. That means you need to connect with them and their lives. Don’t expect clients to take you at your word, no questions asked. Whether it’s a product, service, or process, clients need to see the relevance to them and their needs. Clients aren’t pushovers. If they don’t recognize authenticity in what you’re advising, they’ll simply move on to the next advisor. They’ll consider you a commodity until you prove otherwise.
  5. Clients want to be active participants. Truth be told, you shouldn’t want to work with clients who aren’t active participants because it’s a sign that they don’t care—at least until there’s a market correction or crash. Financial life planners go out of their way to empower clients to make wise financial decisions and to develop a sense of mastery in this area of life. Not only do your clients need to invest, but they also need to be invested in the decisions you make together.
  6. We all need balance and meaning in our lives. Both you and your clients want balanced and meaningful lives, even if your definitions differ. Financial life planners help their clients clarify goals in all areas of life and design a financial strategy to support those goals. And likewise, if a client is causing you inordinate stress, it may be time to think about parting ways.
  7. Clients have an internal compass guiding their life decisions. When a course of action conflicts with a client’s “compass” (i.e., their values and priorities), inner conflict results. When a course of action is in harmony with a client’s inner compass, tranquility follows. It’s essential to help clients identify the values and priorities that are important to them—and then guide them in making decisions that are in sync with those values and priorities.

Asking the right questions is an important part of this process (see my books, Your Client’s Story and Defining Conversations). Remember, the most impactful communication involves more listening than speaking. Your goal as a financial life planner is to get to know a client intimately enough to be able to tailor your advice to that client’s unique circumstances, goals, and values.

Is there a yellow brick road where a true win-win relationship exists for you and your clients? I believe there is a place where the dreams and hopes of clients can merge seamlessly with your own—once you move from being transaction-focused to transition-focused:

  • You focus on what is happening in your client’s life.
  • You focus on what could happen in your client’s life.
  • You focus on what your client wishes would happen.

It’s important to remember that you don’t start with a financial plan and then work your client’s life plan into it. Instead, you start with a life plan and then build a financial plan to accommodate or accelerate that life plan.

Years ago, I heard the following story. A woman was having a conversation with a builder she had hired to work on her deck. The builder asked about her plans for the property in her backyard. The woman told him she was having a hard time deciding exactly what to do, so she had done nothing. The builder asked some more specific questions about the designs floating around in her head and began sketching what she was telling him as they continued talking. After seeing his sketches, she asked him what it would cost to bring these sketches to life––and found out that the project was well within her means.

This is what I mean about helping your clients achieve their goals. Let’s face it: we all have dreams, visions, and ideas about designing (or redesigning) our lives in some way. These ideas are often nebulous until we have a conversation with someone who knows how to sketch out the image of what the change might look like, knows how to plan out the steps to completion, and knows how much it’s going to cost to get there. The goal is merging a dream with reality––to make it happen.

The best financial life planners understand the balance between a client’s goals, transitions, and the funds required to meet those goals and support their transitions. I’ve developed a simple list to help your clients communicate their goals and transitions to get the conversation started. While the list is not exhaustive, it will give you a launching point to begin the conversation.