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 [...]