Kitces.com - Advancing Knowledge in Financial Planning

Reboot, Rewire or Retire? Personal Experiences With Phased Retirement and Managing A Life Portfolio

February 27, 2019 07:07 am 1 Comment CATEGORY: Retirement Planning

With the ongoing commoditization of asset-allocated portfolios, there is an increasing focus on adding value to clients outside of the portfolio itself… which, in the context of the retirees that most financial advisors serve, means going beyond just retirement portfolio management and liquidation strategies. For many advisors, the starting point has been obtaining a deeper expertise in areas like Social Security timing and Medicare planning during Open Enrollment, and perhaps a more holistic view of planning for and managing health care costs in retirement. Arguably, though, perhaps the biggest area in which financial advisors can add value for retirees is not merely in the technical areas of planning, but in helping them make the life transition to retirement itself, and figure out how to live happy and fulfilled lives in retirement itself.

In this guest post, former actuary and Mercer retirement consultant, Anna Rappaport, shares her own perspective on retirement, the value that financial advisors can add and the “real” areas of concerns for retirees, as someone who has both consulted and studied the issue extensively… and is actually living it as a part of her own phased retirement for nearly 15 years.

As Anna finds that, in practice, the key to retirement well-being is to have a balanced “life portfolio” where the retiree focuses on 4 key areas: Health (and the activities to maintain and support health); People (family, friends, community organizations, and the ability to create new contacts as needed); Pursuits (work, volunteering, hobbies, community activities, caregiving, travel, etc.); and Places (home and community). As even with retirement finances well intact, retirees who have a gap in one or more of these areas may still struggle with their personal retirement well-being.

Accordingly, from the advisor’s perspective, asking probing questions about how a prospective retiree will round out the key areas of their People, Pursuits, Places, and Health life portfolio in retirement creates a unique way to enrich the client relationship, delving into the areas beyond the finances alone (even as finances do impact how retirees may try to fulfill their life portfolio as well).

And for those who aren’t certain what to talk about when it comes to the life portfolio, and the key questions to ask, Anna shares her own valuable perspective as a phased retiree herself on what the areas and issues really are, that retirees – and their advisors – should be more aware of!

#FASuccess Ep 113: Scaling An Advisory Firm To Serve A Greater Mission Beyond Yourself, With Stacy Francis

February 26, 2019 07:21 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Financial Advisor Success Podcast

Welcome back to the 113th episode of Financial Advisor Success Podcast!

My guest on today's podcast is Stacy Francis. Stacy is the president and CEO of Francis Financial, an independent RIA based in New York City that manages nearly $280 million in assets for 140 affluent clients.

What's unique about Stacy, though, is her deep dive niche into working with and financially empowering women. From her RIA's focus on hourly consulting with women going through the divorce process before working with them as ongoing wealth management clients, to her launch of Savvy Ladies, a nonprofit dedicated to providing financial empowerment to women, and all stemming from Stacy's own challenging family situation of witnessing a beloved grandmother who stayed in an abusive marriage until the end because she wasn't financially empowered enough to leave.

In this episode, we talk in depth about Stacy's unique niche focus in working with women who were recently widowed or going through a divorce, the unique referral network that she's been able to develop by becoming known for a targeted specialization, how she effectively gets paid to market her wealth management services by getting paid hourly to consult with women going through the divorce process and then finding that nearly 95% of them stay on board for an ongoing basis thereafter, and why her biggest regret in the business is not making the decision to go all in to focus on her women and divorce niche sooner as her firm has grown as much in the past 3 years within her niche than in the prior 15 years leading up to it.

We also talk about the unique way that Stacy has structured her firm and developed her team to deliver services to clients. From a rotating team structure where one lead advisor may work with up to three different support teams of analysts and associate to service clients based on who will work with them best, to the firm's use of interns to efficiently deliver the labor-intensive aspects of their investment and financial planning process, why the firm has two full-time employees and its own intern in marketing to help support in its ongoing growth, and why Stacy not only uses a business coach to guide her own success but also hires a separate coach to work with her team members and navigate their success as well.

And be certain to listen to the end, where Stacy shares why and how she ultimately decided to grow her advisory firm beyond just delivering services to clients herself, and why she believes that financial planning is an especially good career for women because of how flexible it is to mold the business around your life, even as she recognizes that she didn't take advantage of that flexibility and ask for help early on in her own career when, in retrospect, she wishes she had.

Lessons Learned In Building A Successful Podcast After 100 Episodes

February 25, 2019 07:03 am 1 Comment CATEGORY: Nerd's Eye View

The first time I heard a podcast as a listener, I knew it was something I wanted to do myself.

For me, the moment came when listening to a podcast called “This Is Your Life” by Michael Hyatt back in the summer of 2013 when I was on my own journey in finding a better work/life balance and stumbled upon Hyatt’s podcast on personal leadership.

The weekly episodes quickly became a weekly habit for me, and I was virtually always able to find at least one useful takeaway. The commitment was easy; I usually listened with it in the background while driving someplace or another, or while taking my daughter (back then I only had 1!) for a neighborhood walk in the stroller. Yet the connection was powerful. With the podcast playing in my ear, it felt like Hyatt was literally in my head, and that when he talked about his struggles, I was sharing in his journey and he was talking directly to me!

At that point, I resolved to launch my own podcast. As someone who writes very “long form” content, I’ve always been cognizant that there are many people who might be interested in what we have to share, but will simply never read a long “Kitces-style” article. So an alternative format – a podcast – was clearly a plus, as a different way to produce content and reach a slightly different audience that was more interested in learning through hearing than via reading. And I hoped that I’d be able to create a deeper connection with my audience by creating the same kind of "audio intimacy" that drew me to Hyatt’s work as well.

And so I resolved that, for 2014, I would have two strategic goals: 1) launch a podcast; 2) launch this “side business” idea that I had, called XY Planning Network. In reality, #2 launched first and grew so quickly that it consumed all my time to do #1 (not to mention that we separately launched the XYPN Radio podcast in the summer of 2015)! Life doesn’t always turn out as planned! And as a result, I didn’t manage to circle back to starting my own podcast until the summer of 2016, with a final launch at the start of 2017.

Now nearly 2 years, 100 episodes, and 1.6 million(!) downloads later, I’ve learned a lot about what it takes – and what not to do! – when launching a podcast and building an audience. And so, in the hopes that it is useful to at least a few others who may be considering whether to start a podcast as well, I share with you my journey and the lessons learned along the way!

Weekend Reading for Financial Planners (Feb 23-24)

February 22, 2019 02:55 pm 0 Comments CATEGORY: Weekend Reading

Enjoy the current installment of "weekend reading for financial planners" – this week's edition kicks off with the huge industry news that Envestnet has purchased PortfolioCenter from Schwab, just months after Schwab announced that it was not going to create a full-scale upgraded cloud replacement to its still-popular platform, in what appears to be a tremendous strategic win for Envestnet (given both that Tamarac itself is built on top of PortfolioCenter, and that the acquisition gives Tamarac over 2,000 "new" PortfolioCenter desktop users to cross-sell their Tamarac cloud-based solution to).

Also in the news this week is a study from Cerulli finding that consumers do increasingly show a preference to pay their advisors with ongoing AUM fees or retainer fees... unless they're mostly self-directed, in which case they'd actually prefer to pay commissions on each transaction as needed instead. And there's also a fascinating recap of industry lobbyist spending in financial services, which finds that product manufacturing and distribution firms (e.g., fund companies, insurance and annuity carriers, and broker-dealers) spent more than $15M in lobbying last year, while advisor-centric organizations spent less than $300k... which goes a long way to explaining why the industry manages to keep defeating or watering down each proposed fiduciary rule!

From there, we have several articles on marketing, from tips on how to actually pick a specific niche or otherwise select an ideal target client (from the seemingly endless number of available choices), to why factors like "having at least $500,000 in investable assets" or "is a delegator" may be important "acceptance criteria" to selecting a new client (or not) but should not be part of the description of your ideal client profile (because they don't define needs that you solve that would make you more referrable), and a series of tips on what you must consider when designing a good financial advisor website.

There are also a number of investment articles this week, from two articles that look at how the recent launches of zero-fee mutual funds are not actually attracting significant new asset flows (suggesting that perhaps consumers are either becoming wary of "free" from financial services firms, or simply that index funds have become "cheap enough" that price is no longer going to be the driver it once was), to another that looks at recent criticisms against index funds from regulators wondering if perhaps there are now too many behind-the-scenes conflicts for index fund providers in how they construct and execute their index funds.

We wrap up with three interesting articles, all around the theme of personal productivity and efficiency: the first is a fascinating look at how Aaron Klein of Riskalyze manages his increasingly busy email Inbox (and why despite the near email overload, he views email as his "secret weapon" and not a burden); the second explores the benefits of time-blocking, where entire days are set to one type of task (e.g., client meetings) or another (e.g., internal/staff meetings and prep) to reduce the amount of task- and context-switching that ultimately degrades personal productivity; and the last is a review of the recent book "Atomic Habits" by James Clear, which dives into how to actually change and improve your habits for the better, noting that improving by "just" 1% per day leads to a massive 3,700% improvement in the span of a year, and emphasizing that the key to achieving even massive long-term goals may not be in focusing on the long-term goal itself, but simply trying to establish the small short-term habits that can help you get on the right track... and then let the compounding of that habit carry you the rest of the way!

Enjoy the "light" reading!

How To Choose The Best TAMP To Work With And Factors To Consider

February 21, 2019 01:55 pm 1 Comment CATEGORY: Investments

As the trend towards financial planning as the primary value proposition for financial advisors continues to gain momentum, one of the biggest challenges that emerges is freeing up the time to provide that financial planning advice to an ever-growing number of clients. As all growing advisory firms eventually get to a point where there just isn’t simply enough time in the day to devote to nurturing client relationships (and developing new ones) and do all the other stuff necessary to make the business actually happen! Accordingly, one of the most cost- and time-efficient ways to increase the time an advisor can spend better servicing clients is by outsourcing the process of implementing (and managing) investment planning recommendations to a TAMP, or turnkey asset management platform. Yet for those advisors who do decide to outsource their investment management, the question then becomes, with the dizzying array of TAMPs on the marketplace, how do you determine which one is best (or at least, best suited to the individual advisor’s needs)?

Accordingly, in this week’s #OfficeHours with @MichaelKitces, my weekly broadcast via Periscope, we examine six areas of due diligence questions to consider when choosing a TAMP, how to understand the real costs of TAMPs, and the various ways advisors can position the cost of paying for a TAMP’s services (alongside the advisor’s own advisory fee).

Of course, as an outsourced investment management platform, one of the first (and most important) questions to ask any TAMP provider is about how they approach investments in the first place. Because all investment management firms have some sort of philosophical preference…. and without getting into the merits of one strategy over another, the reality is that whatever approach a TAMP uses is going to become your approach if you use that TAMP. Which means, ultimately, you as the advisor are going to be the one responsible for not only selling that investment philosophy (and process) to your clients, but also defending that approach when the inevitable bear market or stint of underperformance occurs. So be certain the TAMP’s philosophy is one you’re ready and willing to defend… and that the TAMP has a process to execute that philosophy, and a performance track record to validate they can deliver!

From a more nuts-and-bolts perspective, other key points to consider when evaluating a TAMP include: make sure that the TAMP is approved on your platform (if you’re under a broker-dealer), or that the TAMP can work with your custodian (if you’re with an RIA); what sort of additional technology do the various TAMPs offer (because there is a wide variety amongst providers, with some offering their own proprietary solutions, others not offering any, while still other TAMPs bolt on other third-party platforms); and what amount of additional staff support does the TAMP offer (or not), including administrative services, investment research, and marketing support.

And don’t forget that you need to determine how much the TAMP actually costs. As with anything, you get what you pay for, and at least in the TAMP marketplace, the pricing usually coincides with the level of service and support that’s provided. But, some TAMPs do price higher than others, and you need to factor in the expense ratios of the investment products they use as well, which get stacked on top of the TAMP’s base fee and can materially impact the all-in cost to your client!

Finally, bear in mind that if you plan to use a TAMP, you have to figure out how you’re going to pay for the TAMP. Some advisors simply treat the TAMPs fees as an additional cost to the client over and above their own management fee (just as the client would have paid a mutual fund manager’s expense ratio above-and-beyond the advisor’s own fee), while other advisors treat the TAMP’s fee as a business expense (because they would have otherwise had to hire and pay staff to see to those duties) and pay it from their own advisory fee, while other advisors “share” the fee with their clients, tacking on only a portion of what they’re paying the TAMP and absorbing the rest of the fee themselves (in lieu of the other staff they would have had to hire anyway).

Ultimately, the key point is that it’s important to spend time taking a deep look at each TAMP provider to make sure that you’re both a good fit for each other, both from a pure philosophical investment viewpoint, and with respect to the technology and other support services the TAMP does or does not offer (which you may or may not need!), and make sure that their offerings address the needs of your clients and how you want to run your business. No one TAMP is the best solution for every advisor, and it’s worth your time to do the due diligence to find the right one for your current and future needs in serving your clients.

The Extraordinary Upside Potential Of Sequence Of Return Risk In Retirement

February 20, 2019 07:03 am 5 Comments CATEGORY: Retirement Planning

One of the key challenges of determining “reasonable” spending in retirement is that, even if the advisor is right about the anticipated long-term returns of the retirement portfolio, there’s a risk that ongoing withdrawals on top of a series of early bad returns will cause the portfolio to be fully depleted before the good returns finally arrive to average out in the long run. As a result, retirees must generally spend less than what expected returns alone would otherwise predict is affordable, to defend against this “sequence of return risk”.

Yet the caveat is that while a bad sequence of returns coupled with ongoing withdrawals can catastrophically deplete a portfolio too quickly, a good sequence of returns can quickly compound the portfolio so far ahead that substantial excess wealth accrues instead. In fact, because of how long-term returns compound to the upside, favorable sequences of returns actually produce far more excess wealth than unfavorable sequences risk to the downside. For instance, taking a 4% initial withdrawal rate has an equal (10%) likelihood of leaving all the retiree’s principal left over at the end of retirement… or leaving 6X the starting account balance remaining instead.

Which means not only is it important to give at least some consideration to the potential and upside “risk” of getting a favorable sequence of returns, but the asymmetric nature of sequence risk to the upside suggests that simply spending conservatively and adjusting later if a “good” surprise occurs may be too likely to leave dramatic levels of unspent wealth that could have been enjoyed earlier. After all, at a 4% initial withdrawal rate, the odds of nearly depleting the portfolio are equal to the odds of growing it by more than 800%(!), and even at a 5% withdrawal rate, the odds of depleting the portfolio early are equal to the odds of tripling the retiree’s starting principal on top of taking an initial withdrawal rate of 5% with 30 years of annual inflation adjustments.

So what’s the alternative? To plan, in advance, for retirement spending strategies to be more dynamic… at minimum, to have a ratcheting plan in place to lift a low initial spending rate higher if the sequence is favorable (or at least, is not unfavorable), and for those who are willing to be more flexible in their retirement spending, to set guardrails in advance to know both when to cut spending in a bad sequence, and when to lift it higher in a more favorable one.

The bottom line, though, is simply to recognize that sequence of return risk truly cuts both ways, creating both the risk of depleting a portfolio too early with a bad sequence (even if returns do average out in the long run), but also the risk of the retiree waiting too long to fully spend and failing to enjoy the assets and income that turned out to be available because a favorable sequence of returns occurred instead!