Should fiduciary wealth management firms have minimum capital requirements, to ensure they can make good to clients if they do fail in their fiduciary duties? One of the professed strengths of the RIA model is the fact that such firms are held to a fiduciary standard, providing a higher level of legal accountability for firms that fail to put their clients' interests ahead of their own. But strictly speaking, that really only holds as a consumer protection if the firm has the financial wherewithal to actually pay damages, should they arise. Read More...
When hiring new planners for associate planner positions, many firm owners say they want to find someone just like them; in the words of Peter Lynch, they “buy what [they] know.” It is human nature after all – we prefer staying in our comfort zone and don’t operate as well with the unknown. However, in practice this is often exactly what a firm does NOT need; if the firm owner skill set is strategic visionary, relationship manager, and primary rainmaker, then the firm should strive to find candidates with complementary skill sets to fill in gaps. Especially in a small organization, too much overlap will lead to inefficiencies. Nonetheless, some business owners choose to go this route anyway. So if you are going to hire a 'mini-me', what should you be aware of?
If there's one staple of financial planning wisdom that virtually everyone will agree upon, it's stocks for the long run. Sure, we all acknowledge that markets can be volatile in the short term, but we all seem to still agree that in the long run, stocks are still where it's at. So as long as you have a long enough time horizon - whether you're a young person still accumulating, or a retiree looking at a multi-decade spending phase - stocks are still a material portion of the portfolio. But within the past hundred years alone, there was nearly an entire generation - who grew up during the Great Depression - that gave up on stocks for their entire lives. What if that happened again? Has the financial planning profession hitched itself to the stocks-for-the-long-run wagon so tightly that if stocks fall off a cliff, so too will the profession?Read More...
In the dating world, being "too forward" generally means trying to advance a relationship at a pace that is too fast for comfort; being too confident and direct in what is said, to a point that may not be socially acceptable. The general remedy in the dating world, then, is to "take it slow" and allow the relationship to build trust before trying to advance a relationship to the next stage. Of course, building a trusting relationship is not unique to the dating world; many of the exact same dynamics apply in building the planner-client relationship. Yet in practice, because financial planning relationships must move to an implementation stage after “relatively” few meetings, planners often must be very forward during the sensitive relationship-building phase. But how far is too far? Have you been asking your clients to get naked on the first date?
Some financial planners consider budgeting and cash flow the cornerstone of a client's financial plan; for others, the focus is on long-term planning, and they let client cash flow sort itself out. In many situations, planners seem to be uncomfortable in giving spending guidance to clients; as the saying goes, "It's their money; who am I to tell them how to spend it?" Yet at the same time, most would probably agree that clients can't just save their way out of their fiscal woes; you only free up money to save by first determining what to NOT spend it on.
So does that mean in the end, planners can't have a broader impact until they are more active in helping clients actually set spending policies?Read More...
The prevailing wisdom in financial planning is that clients should stay the course... always. It's "never" appropriate for clients to get out of stocks (even a little bit), and the eternal chiding to any so-called market timer is that even if you can figure out when to get out, you'll never figure out when to get back in again, and you'll miss any rally that might follow a market decline. But does this miss the point? If you actually sell BEFORE a severe market decline (as opposed to after), you don't even NEED to get back in until the market recovers anyway!Read More...
