Life-Centered Financial Planning Essentials: Would You Invest in the Companies You’re Recommending to Clients? Do you want to invest in companies that you are proud of? I’m sure your response was, “Of course!” But truth be told, most us haven’t been paying attention. It just makes sense to reward companies that reward their employees, their [...]
Life-Centered Financial Planning Essentials: Why One Retirement Plan Does Not Fit All Not all people retire well. Some people can’t retire soon enough: their workplace, their coworkers, and their workload are literally killing them. On the other end of the spectrum, some people will never retire because who they are and what they do are [...]
Life-Centered Financial Planning Essentials: Don’t Start the Conversation with Goals Have you ever asked a client what his or her goals are, only to be met with a deer-in-the-headlights response? Most people are so caught up in the present that they haven’t yet framed a portrait for the future. Goals are an important conversation, but [...]
Life-Centered Financial Planning Essentials: Focus on Behaviors that Produce Results The core question driving the advice and planning world has been, “Do you or will you have enough money?” Little wonder then that advisors spend so much time validating allocations, investments, and returns, thereby creating a never-ending cul-de-sac dynamic where they must constantly justify how [...]
Life-Centered Financial Planning Essentials: Understanding Your Client’s Journey How did your clients come by their attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, and habits around money? By chance or by happenstance? To arrive at an answer requires a unique skill set—that of a biographer. In fact, your competence regarding discovery comes down to developing this biographical competency with your [...]
Life-Centered Financial Planning Essentials: Client Reality Check Your clients want—and need—a reality check from you: Reality Check 1: Your clients need to know where their money is going. That means conducting a lifetime cash flow analysis with your clients. Reality Check 2: Your clients need to be responsible for their own assumptions. Reality Check 3: [...]
Life-Centered Financial Planning Essentials: What Really Smart Financial Advisors Do Having a fruitful conversation involves merging meaning with the person you are speaking with. It does not mean that you should monopolize the conversation by doing all the talking, essentially engaging in a monologue instead of a dialogue. Instead, the act of dialogue is focused [...]
Life-Centered Financial Planning Essentials: The Difference Between Success and Failure Soft skills are the hard stuff—but they’re the difference between success and failure when it comes to life-centered financial planning. Learn all you can about the people business—ultimately, this is what will pay the bills. Soft skills is your profit margin. Empathy when listening to [...]
Life-Centered Financial Planning Essentials: The Six Core and Intangible Values that Your Clients Want and Need If your goal is to bring value that cannot be commoditized, you need to understand the six core and intangible values your clients want and need that only life-centered financial advisors can deliver: Organization: You help bring order [...]
Life-Centered Financial Planning Essentials: The Most Important Factor in the Equation The key difference between money-centered and life-centered financial planners is that money-centered financial planners use inferior processes that treat money as if it were the most important factor in the equation. This is a critical difference because those processes fail to account for [...]
Life-Centered Financial Planning Essentials: Focusing on the Purpose of Your Client's Money Traditional financial planning has mostly been focused on helping clients make and save more money. But lost in the shuffle is their money’s purpose. The Return on Life™ (ROL) Manifesto is a way life-centered financial advisors can help clients understand the underlying value [...]
Life-Centered Financial Planning Essentials: The Nexus of Advisor-Client Relationships and Dialogue What should the nexus of the advisor-client relationship and dialogue be? Is there a more profound anchoring point aside from the money mechanics—investing, rebalancing, and reviewing—that has been sold in the past? Although these mechanics will always be a part of the process, they [...]
Life-Centered Financial Planning Essentials: The Difference Between What Client's Want and What They Expect There’s a big difference between what clients want, and what they expect. Let me explain. Clients expect their advisor to be trustworthy and well-qualified, but what they want is peace of mind, financial security, and financial independence. To help clients achieve [...]
Life-Centered Financial Planning Essentials: Stop Clinging to Promises That You Can't Deliver It’s time to stop clinging to the promises that are impossible to deliver consistently over time: Prognosticating next year’s financial climate. Executing perfect timing. Having to perpetually outperform last year’s—or someone else’s—returns. All three are traps—promises that can’t help but be broken. Here’s [...]
Life-Centered Financial Planning Essentials: The Only Context Clients Care About With life-centered financial planning, “life” is the point, the objective, the logical conclusion, and the only context that clients care about. It’s about getting your eyes off the numbers and your ears on their stories. Progress is measured by the impact their money has on [...]
Life-Centered Financial Planning Essentials: Is Your Value Proposition Sustainable? How can you tell if your value proposition is unsustainable? You cannot control the outcome. The value of your offering continues to erode, and the price being paid continues to fall. Your business model asks more and more of you but pays less and less. If [...]
Originally posted in Financial Advisor (fa-mag.com) on July 1, 2020. On a recent trip to Alaska to see my son, a park ranger, I asked him about how officers like him are trained to respond in the most stressful and chaotic situations. In triage training, for example, when a gunshot victim is bleeding out, officers [...]
Originally posted in Financial Advisor (fa-mag.com) on September 1, 2020. With everything going on around the world—a global pandemic, economic uncertainty and social unrest—being able to have meaningful and impactful conversations is more important than ever. Let’s face it: We lack dialogue as a society. We’ve replaced it with a perpetual and driving need to [...]
Originally posted in Financial Advisor (fa-mag.com) on May 1, 2020 Over the last two years I’ve had the privilege of speaking at a gathering for employees of the American Transmission Company (ATC) based in the Milwaukee area. The first time I spoke to one of the groups, the employees that had gathered ranged from age [...]
Originally posted in Financial Advisor (fa-mag.com) on March 1, 2020 I recently was invited to a think tank hosted by Eventide Asset Management, a company in the values investing space. CIO Finny Kuruvilla gave a talk and I was confronted with the question, “Do you want to own companies that you are proud of?” Well, [...]