Good financial planning is typically built upon a personal relationship between the client and the planner, as trust is established to the point that the client is comfortable to share and engage with the planner, and take the advice that is given. Yet the reality is that while it takes time to build trust, it doesn't necessarily have to be built face-to-face. In fact, as personal finance 'celebrities' like Suze Orman have shown, a remarkable amount of actionable advice can be implemented even if the person giving the advice and the person receiving the advice have never met in person at all! So what does it take to begin to establish trust with a prospective client before ever meeting face to face? As Orman demonstrates, the keys are that people work with people, expert credibility is important but not alone sufficient, and trust is built over time through repeated exposure to the planner. And in today's world, the digital age is leveling the playing field; it's not just about being on television or having a radio show anyone, because any planner can begin to build trust with potential future clients, through blogs, e-newsletters, videos, social media, and other channels of the digital world!
As the retirement income research evolves, an increasingly common question is whether the popular safe withdrawal rate approach is better or worse than an annuity-based strategy that provides a guaranteed income floor, with the remaining funds invested for future upside.
Yet the reality is that as it's commonly applied, the safe withdrawal rate strategy is a floor-with-upside approach, too. Unlike the annuity, it doesn't guarantee success with the backing of an insurance company; yet at the same time, the annuity is assured to provide no remaining legacy value at death, while the safe withdrawal rate approach actually has a whopping 96% probability of leaving 100% of the client's principal behind after 30 years!
Which means an annuity is really an alternative floor approach to safe withdrawal rates - one that provides a stronger guarantee while producing a similar amount of income, but results in a dramatic loss of liquidity, upside, and legacy. Does the common client preference towards safe withdrawal rates and away from annuities indicate that in the end, most clients just don't find the guarantee trade-off worthwhile for the certainty it provides?Read More...
![Social Image Human and Financial Capital](https://www.kitces.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Social-Image-2-Human-and-Financial-Capital-150x150.png)
![Social Image Human and Financial Capital](https://www.kitces.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Social-Image-2-Human-and-Financial-Capital-150x150.png)
One of the foundational principles of retirement success is to start saving early. After all, the longer that money can stay invested, the more compounding growth can work in your favor; all the better if your savings grow inside a Roth IRA and avoid the grinding impact of taxation.
Yet the reality is that clients really have two major assets: their financial assets, and their human capital asset. And when the client is young, the human capital asset is actually the bigger of the two by far. As a result, allocating savings towards human capital in ways that increase its value or growth rate can actually have far more impact than investments in financial assets; spending $2,000 on classes that produce a $1,000 raise in base salary can, over the next 40 years, generate nearly 20 times the wealth of merely saving the $2,000 in a Roth IRA and growing it for decades.
Does that mean that clients who allocate savings to retirement accounts when they're young are actually making an inferior long-term investment?
Although Social Security benefits are a major part of retirement planning, since the Social Security Administration stopped mailing statements to workers last year, most planners have been limited in their ability to get updated Social Security information for clients - especially new clients who may not have a prior benefits estimate, and/or who may have never previously reviewed their earnings record.
Fortunately, earlier this month the Social Security Administration launched a new online platform allowing anyone to access their own Social Security benefits estimate and earnings record.
In response, many planners are now starting to walk clients through the process of claiming their online Social Security account - which can be done on the spot, in the planner's office, in less than 5 minutes! - and reviewing the benefits estimate and earnings record as a part of their new or existing client meetings!Read More...
The delivery of advice is ultimately built on a foundation of trust; even if the client is otherwise ready to make a change, if the client doesn't trust the advisor, the advice often won't be taken and implemented. And because most planners struggle and work hard just to establish client trust through in-person meetings and a one-on-one relationship, many are skeptical that advice will ever fully shift to a more virtual world where trust must be built at a distance and possibly without ever having the client and planner meet in person at all.
Yet there is a surprisingly visible demonstration of how trust can be built effectively in a "virtual" environment where the person taking the advice may have never met the person delivering the advice: the Suze Orman show. Does that mean planners have much to learn from the success of Suze Orman, who has built a virtual relationship with millions of people who are all willing to act on her advice, even while so many planners struggle to build trusted relationships one in-person prospective client meeting at a time?Read More...
As a growing body of research shows, our brains are not quite the logical, rational decision-making machines we think they are – or at least, wish they could be. Instead, our brains take shortcuts; we substitute easier questions for difficult ones, often without realizing it, and respond accordingly with our words and our actions. This can be especially problematic in the world of financial planning, where we often ask clients to make difficult decisions with limited information.
As a result, questions like “what is an acceptable probability of success/failure for your retirement plan?” often get switched for other questions, like “how intensely bad would you feel if your retirement plan failed?” While the questions are still similar, there is an important difference: if you have not clearly defined both the meaning of success and the meaning of failure, your clients may misjudge the intensity of the consequences, leading to an irrational and inappropriate decision about how much or how little “risk” to take.Read More...
One of the major reasons that advocates recommend the fiduciary standard is the belief that if only everyone were subject to the standard, fewer client abuses would occur, because advisors would fear the repercussions (i.e., legal liability) of inappropriate recommendations that fail to meet the standard. Yet at the same time, the financial services industry has been plagued with scandals, and it's not just Bernie Madoff, Allen Stanford, and numerous commission-based advisor improprieties; in the past three years, there have even been investigations against two former NAPFA presidents for malfeasance. Which raises the question - if even people who have led such a fiduciary-centric organization as NAPFA can still conduct such misdeeds, does fiduciary really provide the necessary consumer protections? Or is the fiduciary standard really only effective for those who weren't likely to violate its principles anyway?Read More...
As financial planners - especially those who provide comprehensive financial planning services - try to convey the overall value of the services they provide, it is increasingly popular to reduce how often portfolio performance is reported to clients. As the theory goes, if performance is reported less frequently, clients will fixated on it less often.
Yet perhaps the reality is not that performance reporting is making clients focus on investments, but instead that clients are simply being prudent stewards of their wealth who want to know how they're progressing towards their goals?
If that's the situation, then the reality is that restricting access to good portfolio information may not make clients think about it less, but instead may make them worry about it more! Which means, counter-intuitively, that the best way to make clients focus less on investments may be to make information available even more often!
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The financial planning world is in a state of change, as the rise of the digital age begins to exert its impact upon the profession. Thus far, trends have included the shift to outsourcing, the rise of web-based software, and a growing number of planners using services like GoToMeeting and Skype to supplement face-to-face meetings with more virtual interactions. As the coming decade wears on, technology will play an increasing role in the financial planning world, driving change in everything from how we deliver services to the client experience.
Nonetheless, while technology will continue to augment financial planners, it will never replace them, for one simple reason - real financial planning solutions require clients to implement recommendations and make changes in their lives, and there are few forces for behavior change more effective than the accountability of another human being. Which means, simply put, as long as we are human beings and our brains operate the way that they do, effective financial planning will require another human being at the other end of the relationship, especially in times of stress and when we need an outside perspective. Technology alone may give clients the answers... but the fact that we all don't get the right amount of exercise, eat a perfect diet, and take all the other steps necessary to become optimal human beings, makes it clear that technology delivering information alone will never be the solution.
Life insurance policies - permanent ones in particular - have long been difficult to accurately evaluate, due to the relative opacity of actual pricing representations comingled with performance assumptions in policy projections.
To address this challenge, a company called Veralytic has developed a tool to "x-ray" through a life insurance policy illustration, evaluating and benchmarking the underlying policy expenses and their viability.
In the near term, Veralytic's analytical tools may provide a way for financial planners to finally conduct effective due diligence on client proposed and existing life insurance policies.
In the longer run, though, the transparency and benchmarking that Veralytic is bringing to the life insurance industry has a chance to truly reform the industry, making it clear which products and companies are truly competitive and which are not. But Veralytic cannot reach a tipping point without getting more users on board; accordingly, they've offered readers of this blog a special deal to take a test drive!Read More...