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Kitces & Carl Ep 21: Do You Have To Build Confidence Before Taking Action, Or Take Action To Build Confidence?

November 21, 2019 07:08 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Kitces & Carl Podcast

Confidence is a critical component of success for financial advisors, as those who lack confidence about their knowledge and abilities will struggle to persuade clients to listen to their advice, or even to find and persuasively convince clients to hire them in the first place. But how do financial advisors develop more and better self-confidence to begin with? And is it really necessary to build self-confidence first in order to take action with clients… or is the reality that taking action and having some success is actually what it takes to best builds self-confidence at all? In other words, is it better to just try to go get clients and service them until you feel confident that you do it well? Or to first study and gain the knowledge necessary to feel confident enough to go get clients and service them instead?

In our 21st episode of Kitces & Carl, Michael Kitces and financial advisor communication expert Carl Richards explore these ideas as they talk about the results of a recent Twitter poll conducted by Carl, which posed the compelling question, “Which one of these is true for you? Having confidence leads to action; or taking action leads to confidence.” Surprisingly, respondents were equally divided, with 51% identifying themselves as “confidence first” individuals, and 49% as “action first” individuals.

Each of these ‘camps’ faces its own set of unique obstacles, where “confidence first” people must first study and invest in themselves but might then struggle with getting to a stage where they are ever comfortable taking action, as the hurdle for them is finding enough confidence to get going in the first place (in essence, having a very high “self-permission” threshold to ever take the leap and try). On the other hand, “action first” individuals have a lower permission threshold, realizing that they need to practice the action first using more of a trial-and-error approach, and perhaps even relying on ‘fake-it-‘til-you-make-it’ strategies before they can build the confidence they need to flourish… but might then struggle with undesirable outcomes arising from impulsive behavior, or at worst, undermine their confidence with the failures that result as impulsively gained clients turn around and fire them.

Furthermore, while it might be true that some individuals are hardwired with an affinity for either one side or the other, it’s also possible that some individuals may identify with both sides in a chicken-and-egg circular manner of thinking, where that person may not feel confident without taking some action and having some success, but cannot take that initial action without the upfront confidence that they can even do the action successfully!

Ultimately, the key point is that both paths to confidence work – whether a person needs to build confidence in order to take action, or if they need to take action in order to build confidence – and that both paths depend on individual style and arguably on one’s own self-granted permission threshold.

Regardless of which side a person may identify with (or even if they identify with both), though, a universal strategy to effectively develop confidence involves identifying the smallest doable next step that helps them on the path they are trying to follow (whether that be to take a particular action that will eventually lead to some level of confidence, or to figure out what it would take to build up confidence in the first place, which would facilitate carrying out some particular action), followed by a frequent reassessment of one’s situation to discover any new information or opportunities leading to a new smallest doable next step.

Navigating Social Security’s Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP) With A (Non-Covered) Government Pension

November 20, 2019 07:02 am 12 Comments CATEGORY: Retirement Planning

In the midst of America’s Great Depression (which spanned from the October 1929 “Black Tuesday” stock market crash to the end of the 1930’s), President Franklin D. Roosevelt enacted several “New Deal” programs to provide the country with relief (and to encourage recovery) from the poverty and high rates of unemployment facing Americans at the time. Social Security was (and remains) one of the most significant programs created as part of the New Deal, and was intended to protect Americans from the “hazards and vicissitudes of life”, offering them “general welfare” and “social insurance” through retirement income for those over age 65.

However, Social Security benefits were not initially available for state or local government employees because the institutions they worked for often managed their own retirement (pension) programs for employees. To address the concern that state/local government employees were ‘missing out’ on Social Security, and in part to allow states to shift a portion of the retirement burden to the Federal government, Congress passed Section 218 of the Social Security Act in 1951, providing Social Security benefits to public employees in states that entered into a voluntary (but irrevocable) agreement with the Social Security Administration to coordinate state/Federal government benefits.

But the original Social Security retirement benefit formula did not account for workers who had retirement income from both their pension plans through “non-covered” employers (i.e., state or local government employers who did not pay into Social Security), and Social Security benefits through employers who did pay into Social Security. Which was problematic, because Social Security is designed to provide higher replacement rates for lower income workers, but couldn’t distinguish between those who actually had a lifetime of low income, and those who had high lifetime earnings but whose income from “non-covered” state or local government jobs (with its own pension instead) was excluded from the Social Security benefit calculation. Accordingly, policymakers felt that these workers eligible for both Social Security and a non-covered pension benefit were being awarded a higher Social Security replacement rate than they should have been. Thus, in 1983, Congress established the Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP) to more fairly adjust the Social Security benefit for these “non-covered” workers who appeared, based only on their Social-Security-covered earnings, to be lower-income than they actually had been in their working years.

While the number of workers in the United States who are subject to the WEP is relatively small, it’s becoming more common for advisors to run across clients who are affected by WEP as a greater number of public sector employees who started their careers in non-covered jobs are now approaching retirement.

Fortunately, while the WEP can significantly alter an individual’s total retirement income, there are several strategies that an advisor can employ to minimize that impact, including increasing the number of years with “substantial” earnings from a “covered” employer, or taking a lump-sum distribution of a non-covered pension before becoming eligible for the benefit (thus reducing the length of time the WEP penalty is applied to the Social Security benefit).

Ultimately, the key point is that advisors should be aware of the circumstances under which the Windfall Elimination Provision applies to a retiree’s benefits, and the various rules around how their client’s total retirement benefit (as well as any family/auxiliary Social Security benefits based on the client’s own record) may be impacted by the WEP. At a minimum, it’s crucial to be aware of the WEP to ensure that assumed Social Security benefits are adjusted properly for planning purposes (especially since the WEP adjustment is typically not reflected on the worker’s Social Security statement). And while not all of the WEP penalty can always be unwound even with proactive planning (as might be the case for someone who had a non-covered position early in their career), at the very least, there are a few strategies that advisors have at their disposal to help reduce its overall impact.

#FASuccess Ep 151: Expanding Your Advisory Firm’s Reach With A Retail Prosperity Pie Shoppe, with Luna Jaffe

November 19, 2019 07:04 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Financial Advisor Success Podcast

Welcome back to the 151st episode of Financial Advisor Success Podcast!

My guest on today's podcast is Luna Jaffe. Luna is the founder of Lunaria Financial, an advisory firm in Portland, Oregon that oversees nearly $55 million of assets under management for 100 client households.

What's unique about Luna, though, is that in an effort to solve the challenge of building an advisory practice that ends out with minimums too high to work with everyone, she launched the Sacred Money Studios & Prosperity Pie Shoppe, an actual pie shop across the street from her advisory firm office that offers low-cost financial education programs on budgeting and what Luna calls her Wild Money process.

In this episode, we talk in-depth about what Luna has learned in trying to expand the reach of financial education through a retail store. Why she ultimately decided to charge a standalone fee for each money class instead of an ongoing membership fee, the budgeting philosophy in the Wild Money process she teaches that she has found resonates with those seeking help with their finances, and the real-world challenges that come with opening up a retail store that has to manage retail employees.

We also talk about Luna's own advisory firm. Her unique year-long financial planning process that can run up to 18 meetings by incrementally helping clients implement changes step by step along the way, the exercises she uses from mind mapping to vision cards she created to having clients write a love letter to their money, how Luna integrates the eMoney Advisor portal into her somewhat non-traditional process, why the firm uses the You Need a Budget, YNAB tool to help clients actually change their spending behaviors and the flat fee structure that Luna adopted to ensure she is properly compensated for her time-intensive planning process.

And be certain to listen to the end, where Luna shares why despite the retail challenges, she hopes to ultimately take on investors and expand the reach of Sacred Money Studios, the additional challenge she faced when she decided to break away from Edward Jones to start her own independent firm, and why her biggest tip to other advisors is the importance of finding a mentor, not just one who will listen to you, but one who will pull you forward into what you can really become.

SEO Strategies Financial Advisors Can Use To Attract The Right Clients Through Google Search

November 18, 2019 07:07 am 7 Comments CATEGORY: Marketing

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the practice of trying to maximizing how often a website comes up at the top of search engine results for various keywords, increasing the number of website users to visit a particular website (i.e., website traffic), and ideally bringing visitors who are part of an appropriately targeted audience (and thus are likely to find value in the website and decide to do business). Which is a valuable marketing strategy for financial advisors to make themselves “findable” for consumers who are seeking out a financial advisor to work with (or more generally, someone who can help them with whatever financial problems they’re searching online for answers to!).

In this guest post, Lee Delahoussaye – Founder and Chief Consultant of Mindtap Marketing, a digital marketing consulting firm – provides an overview of how SEO works and discusses how financial advisors can implement simple SEO techniques to optimize their websites for better search rankings.

While there are many different approaches to developing an SEO strategy, the key ingredient that makes SEO work is understanding intent. Unlike other forms of advertising that are based on putting messages in front of people who might be interested in an advisor’s services, internet searchers oftentimes have a specific intention to find something in particular, whether that be a service, product, or getting more information and education. Which is important, because people with a direct need for financial advice search by the tens-of-thousands, with nearly 30,000 searches for terms related to “financial advisor near me” per month. And because the financial services industry is way behind the curve on this, there are still opportunities to achieve positive SEO results by leveraging the intent of those potential clients to find you as their new financial advisor, and ultimately channeling those clients to seek your advisory services.

Importantly, though, designing effective SEO strategies requires a basic understanding of how search engines actually work. And while search algorithms are highly-guarded intellectual property, it is possible to reverse engineer what limited information is known about those algorithms in order to determine a set of repeatable best practices, and then apply those best practices to improve a financial advisor’s search rankings. A good SEO design will start with identifying appropriate keywords or key phrases that the ideal visitor would likely search for and then including those keywords on the website, as well as developing website content to align with the context around those keywords.

There are four basic types of SEO on which specific strategies are based. These include on-page SEO (which encompasses the things that are done on a web page to improve rankings), off-page SEO (which is all about building external links from outside websites to yours), national/international SEO (geared to appeal to audiences based across broad geographic areas), and local SEO (which focuses on an immediate area such as a city, metropolitan area, or cluster of ZIP codes). Financial advisors can employ a mix of these SEO strategies to target visitors that are interested in their services, increasing their organic website traffic with potential clients by improving their search relevance.

Ultimately, the key point is that simple SEO techniques can be powerful tools for financial advisors to develop their own leads through “organic” internet searches. And while some advisors actually pay search engines directly to show up ahead of organic results (without actually attending to organic methods that would influence how their website would be inherently ranked and included in search results), implementing specific SEO strategies can optimize a website in order to attract a certain base of searchers more organically (and at a lower cost) that fit the advisory firm’s ideal target client and are seeking out the services of a financial advisor.

Weekend Reading for Financial Planners (Nov 16-17)

November 15, 2019 02:59 pm 3 Comments CATEGORY: Weekend Reading

Enjoy the current installment of "weekend reading for financial planners" – this week's edition kicks off with the industry announcement that independent broker-dealer network Advisor Group is acquiring fellow IBD network Ladenburg Thalmann, which will create the 2nd largest independent broker-dealer (behind only LPL), with more than 11,500 advisors overseeing $450B in assets across 9 broker-dealer subsidiaries.

From there, we have several practice management articles this week, including a look at the ever-growing breadth of CFP programs for undergraduates (providing students more choices for their CFP education, but arguably making it harder for advisory firms that are hiring to figure out which are the 'best' programs with the best-prepared students), the emerging trend of large advisory firms hiring CTOs (Chief Technology Officers), the new business role of a "Chief Of Staff" that can be used to leverage the efficiency of a founder/CEO (and/or to groom talent for future leadership positions), and an idea on how to better unleash the creativity of your own employees.

We also have several marketing-related articles, from exploring the 'right' way to diversify your marketing (not by diversifying the types of clients you're trying to reach, but instead by diversifying the marketing channels you use to reach a narrower set of target clientele), to tips on figuring out if your niche just isn't working for you yet or if you've picked the wrong niche altogether, the benefits (or not) of hiring a publicist to help an advisory firm with PR (depending on the natural proclivities of the owner towards social media and blogging), and how to build your confidence in your own blogging writing or video abilities to get over the "Imposter Syndrome" of thinking you don't have enough expertise to be valuable (when in fact you do!).

We wrap up with three interesting articles, all around the theme of managing our time: the first looks at how the decade of the 2010s has become the decade we 'lost' control of our time (with the rise of the smartphone and becoming ever-reachable by anyone, anywhere); the second delves into why we seem to have such trouble protecting our time in the modern era; and the last provides some valuable tips on how to get better control of your time by saying "No" more often, and how to change your mindset to get more comfortable with saying "no" more often in the first place!

Enjoy the 'light' reading!

Highlights From The 2019 T3 Enterprise Conference

November 14, 2019 07:10 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Conferences

In the last week of October, executive leadership from numerous independent broker-dealers and large RIAs gathered in South Florida for the 2019 T3 Enterprise Conference (as differentiated from the T3 Advisor Conference that is predominantly attended by individual/independent advisors). Hosted by Joel Bruckenstein and his team from T3 Consulting Services, the two-day conference mixed networking, panel sessions, and vendor presentations, focused more on enterprise-level solutions.

In this guest post, Craig Iskowitz – CEO and founder of Ezra Group, a financial technology consulting firm – shares his signature Twitter-driven recap of the conference, which featured new enterprise-level AdvisorTech offerings, interviews with industry leaders around emerging financial planning trends, and discussions on the challenges (and opportunities) that firms face in a rapidly-changing landscape.

Craig kicks off his recap highlighting Shirl Penney’s observation that fear and inertia are preventing advisors from going independent, but notes that they're also limiting countless advisory firms who won’t let go of their legacy technology (thus keeping legacy vendors in business). Also casting a long shadow over the proceedings was the Black Friday Crash of (Trading) Commissions, which Penney predicts will lead custodians to start charging for their technology (although Craig points out that there are far more intriguing possibilities for new revenue streams… particularly for smaller RIAs).

Another major theme permeating discussions at this year’s T3 Enterprise conference was the ongoing difficulties with vendor integrations. David Ballard from Ladenburg Thalmann pointed out that firms looking to integrate technology stacks and databases experience too many headaches, and that vendors should take the lead on building those integrations amongst themselves before pushing them out to the end-user.

Other highlights included presentations from:

InterGen Data, which combines government census data with other demographic data sets to deliver unique insights into future life events that could have a significant impact on clients and their families;
Whealthcare Planning, whose platform gives advisors tools to help with challenges their aging clients are facing, including helping retirees letting go of their independence around decision-making, driving, and domicile;
BidMoni, whose FiduciaryShield aims to create a marketplace to connect advisors with service providers when supporting company retirement plans (e.g., record keepers, custodians and TPAs);
Morningstar, which introduced Goal Bridge, a financial planning add-on for Advisor Workstation aimed not at selling financial products, but at selling data and analytics instead; and;
Mike Ragunas, CIO of Cetera Financial, who presented details around their implementation of AdvicePay for their new subscription-based direct billing platform.

Ultimately, the 2019 T3 Enterprise Conference brought together a wide range of vendors and firm leaders with the goal of exploring ways to bring real value to their clients through improving the onboarding process and overall experience, while finding opportunities to increase integrations in order to improve firm efficiency and client retention. And, with the trend towards consolidation and aggregation of data and accounts, it behooves fintech providers to focus on integrations and making sure that the user experience is fast, painless, and seamless… or they can be sure that someone else will.