Nerd's Eye View blog

Kitces & Carl Ep 54: Showing Financial Planning Value On An Ongoing Basis After The First 6 Months

February 25, 2021 07:03 am 4 Comments CATEGORY: Kitces & Carl Podcast

An often underappreciated aspect of the financial planning process (and the resulting Plan that financial planning software packages produce) is that it wasn’t originally developed as part of fostering an ongoing client/advisor relationship. Rather, it was a tool that advisors would use to identify “gaps” or “needs” in someone’s overall financial picture… in order to then sell them something to fill that gap! Which, in turn, is why many financial planning software packages are still structured in such a way as to produce moment-in-time snapshots... and why some advisors have turned to other types of client deliverables, such as one-page financial plans and action checklists, as a means to engage clients in an ongoing planning process.

Yet, while there’s a broader recognition that planning isn’t a one-and-done event, the issue remains that clients can often see tremendous progress in the initial stages of working with an advisor, but may end out wondering what value they’re getting on an ongoing basis. Which raises the question: how can advisors create (and more importantly demonstrate) value for their clients... if they aren’t producing a new Financial Plan every year or few?

In our 54th episode of Kitces & Carl, Michael Kitces and financial advisor communication expert Carl Richards discuss the most important factor to consider when thinking about creating ongoing value for clients, strategies advisors can use to actually demonstrate that ongoing value, and how to avoid a common challenge when creating a “value structure”.

As a starting point, it’s important to recognize that the most important aspect of demonstrating ongoing value to clients is consistency. For instance, some advisors adhere to an outreach and meeting cadence throughout the year to make sure that there are (depending on the nature and complexity of the relationship) a certain number of in-depth meetings and touch-points. Others even systematize the process even further by creating (and sharing) checklists of regularly performed tasks and client service calendars in order to actively communicate to clients that their advisor is routinely paying attention to all the big picture (as well as mundane) things on their financial plates (so they don’t have to!)

Meanwhile, some advisors have implemented more “homegrown” solutions to actually track the value that they create for their clients. Some examples include “keeping score”, whereby advisors assign point values to all the various pieces of the financial planning process and tally a score to show clients the progress that they’ve made. Because while advisors do a lot of behind-the-scenes things for their clients, they often underestimate how important it is to actually communicate to clients all those things that they actually do already! Other advisors prefer to track a client’s net worth over time (even having the client themselves enter the number themselves into a spreadsheet to further emphasize progress and ownership), or even keep a running tally of the real dollar value of the money that clients have saved as a result of the advice they’ve received, either of which shows the client the actual progress they’re making on an ongoing basis in real (but non-portfolio) dollar terms.

Ultimately, there are a lot of things that advisors do for their clients to create value beyond ‘just’ producing a five-inch three-ring binder called The Plan once every few years. The key, however, is in being consistent, not only about the doing part, but systematically showing to clients that all the different pieces of their financial puzzle are regularly taken care of. Yet at the same time, it’s important not to get so focused on their systematic process that the advisor may miss uncovering a new issue or pain point. Which can be avoided by asking their clients ahead of meetings if there’s anything that they would like to cover in the upcoming meeting that isn’t already on the agenda... and then making that the very first thing they talk about. Because at the end of the day, the most effective way to demonstrate ongoing value to clients is simply to be ready and prepared to address their ongoing financial planning needs and concerns, whatever may arise!

How Transparent Nudges Can Help Clients Take Action… And Learn, Too

February 24, 2021 07:02 am 1 Comment CATEGORY: Client Trust & Communication

Financial advisors often have clients who are too busy to deal with many of the numerous tasks that are required of them by their financial plans, as their cognitive and/or emotional plates are filled by the issues that take priority in their daily lives. In these situations, advisors can use ‘nudges’ as decision-making aids that automate processes for clients, simplifying routine tasks and helping clients to sidestep potential struggles with willpower, rewarding them with quick results with minimal effort… which, in many instances, is exactly what clients want!

Yet, while nudges can be very useful tools for helping clients to take action, advisors who rely on using nudges with their clients – but who also want to educate their clients – may find themselves challenged to find opportunities to explain the larger reason of ‘why’ behind the financial plan. This is because the primary utility of nudges is often simply to help automate tasks, not necessarily to educate clients. In fact, nudges are often effective precisely because they bypass the parts of our brains that require conscious thought! But without getting educated on why they need to do what their financial plan says is important, clients may ultimately struggle with developing the resiliency and financial self-efficacy that can be crucial to staying the course prescribed by their financial plans in the long run.

However, the reality is that not all nudges are designed equally – there are some nudges that can still be used effectively when the advisor’s intent is to educate clients. There are two dimensions used to characterize nudges, which include Type and Transparency.

Nudge Type refers to the level of conscious thought required to carry out an action; it includes Type 1 nudges (involving automated processes and subconscious decision-making) and Type 2 nudges (involving deliberative action and conscious thought). Nudge transparency, on the other hand, refers to whether the intention behind the nudge is communicated and made clear to the client; the intention of a Transparent nudge is made clear to and is understood by the client, while a Non-Transparent is not.

The significance of understanding nudge types and transparency is that while advisors can effectively use Non-Transparent nudges to support their clients by automating simple tasks, it’s the Transparent nudges (whether they are Type 1 or Type 2) that still force at least some level of conscious thought about the nudge, thereby fulfilling the advisor’s objective to not just help clients change their behavior but educate clients so that they truly understand how their financial plan recommendations are, in point of fact, designed to support their financial goals!

Ultimately, the key point is that, by understanding the psychology behind different styles of nudges, advisors can use these tools to help their clients achieve their financial goals… and still help clients get educated and understand the ‘why’ behind their financial plans. As while some recommendations can be simply nudged to help clients take action with minimal thought and with little regard to the underlying processes (e.g., to set up monthly savings deposits), others necessitate clients learning and accepting the reasons for the things their financial plans require of them (e.g., to review and discuss potential portfolio allocation changes). And with the ability to discern not just when to implement nudges, but also which types of nudges to use, advisors can better match the approach to when clients just need help getting something done, and when there’s an opportunity for them to get better educated along the way (and build their financial resiliency and self-efficacy in the process)!

#FASuccess Ep 217: Creating Value For Next-Generation Clients By Focusing On Actions Over Projections, With Sophia Bera

February 23, 2021 07:08 am 5 Comments CATEGORY: Financial Advisor Success Podcast

Welcome back to the 217th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast!

My guest on today’s podcast is Sophia Bera. Sophia is the founder of Gen Y Planning, an RIA based in Austin, Texas that serves just under 100 young professionals in their 20s, 30s, and 40s.

What’s unique about Sophia, though, is that she was one of the first financial planners to launch a “location-independent” firm, specifically to serve Millennial clients using an up-front plus monthly retainer model that now averages $400 to $500 per month for each of her new clients… yet uses a one-page financial plan and an Action Checklist – not comprehensive financial planning software – to deliver ongoing financial planning value to her next-generation clientele.

In this episode, we talk in-depth about how Sophia and her fully virtual team help Millennial clients navigate the plethora of changes and decisions they face as they establish their careers and their families. How Sophia structures her initial client meetings around goal and value discovery and then putting together her one-page action checklist before establishing an ongoing meeting schedule, why net worth reporting (and not portfolio reporting) is at the heart of her planning process, and why she eschews more mainstream financial planning with its long-term retirement projections in favor of solutions that focus on shorter-term goals instead.

We also talk about how working with next-generation clients can entail a higher turnover rate than managing portfolios for retirees, why Sophia is less worried about retaining a stable book of clients than she is about having the capacity to work with people who need her help the most, the way that Sophia is starting to offer established clients new options around how they can structure their ongoing planning relationship as their needs change, and how Sophia’s own life experiences drive home just how much the quick-fire pace of life changes make a financial planning relationship so valuable for those still in their 30s.

And be certain to listen to the end, where Sophia discusses the deliberate steps she and her team took to prepare ahead of her maternity leave (to the point where her out-of-office responder made it explicitly clear that she wasn’t responding to emails at all for four months), how she spent the first month after returning from her maternity leave focused on the business rather than meeting with clients, and how she’s been able to intentionally build her firm and structure her schedule to make a good living while still having time to focus on the things that are important to her outside of her business as well.

So if you're interested in learning about Sophia's experience with retention rates within a subscription-based fee model, how she's structuring her fees for longer-term clients, and how she incorporates a one-page action plan as a client deliverable, then we hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast!

How To Study For (And Pass) The CFP Exam

February 22, 2021 07:01 am 21 Comments CATEGORY: Personal/Career Development

Since 1991, the CFP Board has offered the CFP certification exam to establish a high standard of excellence for financial advisors to act as fiduciaries for their clients. The exam is a rigorous, 6-hour test, and is offered only three times a year. Because of the rigorous nature of the exam and the scope of material covered (not to mention the relatively low pass rate generally ranging from 60–65%), candidates aspiring for CFP certification invest an inordinate amount of time to ensure that they pass the exam. And to make sure that they structure the time devoted to test preparation most accurately, candidates need to consider several factors, including the requirements to take the CFP exam, their own learning styles and study habits, the resources available to them, and how to structure a schedule to follow to stay on track to best prepare for the exam.

The first important key for any CFP candidate to create a workable study plan for the CFP exam is to understand whether they are visual, auditory, or kinesthetic learners. By knowing their own learning style, candidates can implement the most useful CFP exam prep tools to help them retain and apply the information they will need to pass the exam. Understanding their learning style can also help candidates choose the right CFP exam review course to prepare for the test. While review programs can be expensive (generally ranging from $800 to $1,500), they have helped many candidates successfully prepare for (and pass!) the exam by conditioning them to the style and pacing of questions, helping them review material and create a framework to recall important facts, and providing general support and practice materials.

Candidates will find that creating a structured study schedule is critical for successfully preparing to take the exam. The general recommendation is to devote at least 10 hours per week, with a total of 150-250 hours (which means approximately 4-6 months of preparation), to study for the CFP exam. While most review courses guide candidates through creating a structured study plan, candidates should ensure that they actually stick to their plan of action and devote ample time to any areas they may be struggling with, being mindful to learn and understand the material – not just to memorize it – knowing how the breakdown of topics covered by the exam are weighted. Taking practice exams and working through as many practice questions as possible will help candidates get accustomed to the nature and scope of questions that will be on the exam.

During the final stage of exam preparation, candidates should focus on developing confidence in passing the exam, spending time reviewing the basics in each topic area, and getting plenty of rest to mentally prepare for exam day. On the day of the test, candidates should ensure they have their calculator (and a backup, if possible), a valid photo ID, and a packed lunch that can be kept in their car or on-site locker.

Ultimately, attaining CFP certification is no small task; the exam requires a great deal of commitment and requires candidates to build up enough confidence to actually decide – with conviction! – to pass the exam. While preparing for the exam requires hard work, focus, tenacity, and a lot of effort, the payoff is well worth the sacrifice. CFP professionals can confidently set themselves apart as competent and knowledgeable financial planners who can use their financial planning knowledge to positively impact their clients’ lives by helping them achieve their goals!

Weekend Reading for Financial Planners (Feb 20-21)

February 19, 2021 02:57 pm 5 Comments CATEGORY: Weekend Reading

Enjoy the current installment of "Weekend Reading For Financial Planners" – this week's edition kicks off with the news that the Biden administration will not be halting the new Department of Labor fiduciary rule, which controversially will begin to allow ERISA fiduciaries and those advising on IRA rollovers to receive commissions as long as they otherwise meet "Impartial Conduct Standards"... but that the DoL may still be looking to implement future "improvements" to the rule and its conflict-of-interest exemptions that may tighten the permitted level of conflicted advice in the future.

Also in the news this week are a number of other notable industry headlines, including:

The DoL's new fiduciary rule taking effect means brokers and RIAs will now face additional DoL scrutiny on rollovers from IRAs (and not just when advising on ERISA employer retirement plans) and may need to prepare new policies and procedures to document (and maintain documentation of) their rollover recommendations
A new study on the 'Pulse of the [RIA] Industry' finds that despite the 2020 turmoil, the average RIA grew substantially last year, and the average firm is now projecting a 10% hiring binge in 2021 with ongoing growth

From there, we have several articles on social media marketing:

Key tips on how financial advisors can build their own online personal brand via various social media platforms
How TikTok is rapidly becoming a new platform for financial advisors to market themselves (through short-form 'edutainment' videos)
Why Instagram is proving to be an effective social media marketing channel (particularly for advisors pursuing next-generation upwardly mobile clients)

We've also included a number of retirement-related articles, including:

How fixed annuities can improve net after-tax returns over traditional fixed-income alternatives simply by taking advantage of the tax deferral benefits and avoiding tax drag
Why single premium long-term care insurance may be coming back in vogue (both to avoid the risk of future premium increases, and to 'take money off the table' in the face of high market valuations and low yields)
A look at how to adapt the future of Social Security to support more private savings (and how other countries are dealing with their own social insurance programs)

We wrap up with three final articles, all around the theme of what it takes to build and maintain trust:

How low trust (both between individuals and with industries) can outright increase the cost of doing business and the end cost of products and services (including financial planning) to consumers
How 'humanizing' robo-advisors (by literally giving them a name) actually decreases our trust when looking for help on complex tasks
A deep dive into how the military has managed to maintain its institutional trust while virtually every other major institution has faced declining trust in recent decades (and the lessons it implies for how to get societal trust back on track)

Enjoy the 'light' reading!

Reviewing Social Security Statements And Helping Clients Access And Make Corrections

February 17, 2021 07:05 am 5 Comments CATEGORY: Retirement Planning

In 1999, the Social Security Administration began mailing paper copies of Social Security statements to most American workers that summarized their personalized retirement and disability benefits. While these statements were a valuable source of information for workers to understand their future benefits, budget cuts in 2011 ultimately precluded the Administration from continuing to mail paper statements to all workers. However, the Social Security Administration did make online statements available for workers who went through a simple process to establish an account. Whatever the means of access, though, the annual Social Security statement remains the most straightforward way to both know what Social Security benefits are anticipated to be in the future (at least on the worker’s current earnings trajectory), and to spot discrepancies that could be corrected to increase future benefits as well!

Given the likelihood that the Social Security Administration will continue its current practice of not mailing statements to most workers for the foreseeable future, the primary way financial advisors can help clients access their annual Social Security statements is online via a “my Social Security” account.

Once clients establish their my Social Security account and access their Social Security statements, advisors can review these statements with their clients and use them to verify the client’s reported work history, review current estimates of anticipated Social Security benefits, and explore how the benefits align to the client’s retirement income needs. (Though it is important to note that while advisors can help guide clients through the process of creating a my Social Security account (if their clients don’t have one already), they cannot create such an account for their clients, even with the client’s consent!).

Page 1 of the Social Security statement indicates that Social Security benefits are meant to be a supplementary source of income in retirement. This can be an opportune time to discuss a client’s overall sources of income, reviewing anticipated income to be provided by Social Security benefits, current retirement savings, other retirement income sources like a pension, and the potential need for guaranteed income products such as annuities.

Page 2 of the Social Security statement includes a summary of the worker’s estimated retirement, disability, family survivors, and Medicare benefits. Notably, these benefits do not adjust for inflation (i.e., they are reported in current dollars, not future dollars with projected inflation adjustments). Retirement benefit projections also generally assume that the income a worker earned last year will be how much they will continue to earn, in inflation-adjusting dollars, each year until they reach their retirement age. If there are no reported earnings from the prior year, but there are earnings from the prior-prior year, the earnings from the prior-prior year will be assumed through retirement age. Though if a worker has no earnings from either the prior year or the prior-prior year, the Social Security Administration will assume that there will be no future earnings when projecting future benefits.

Page 3 of an individual’s Social Security statement details the earnings that the Administration has on file for each year since an individual began working. Advisors should encourage clients, especially those who are long-term self-employed individuals, to carefully review the earnings history on their statements. If an error or omission is identified, the mistake should be corrected as soon as possible by providing evidence (e.g., old Form W-2s or pay stubs, and/or tax) of the under-reported income to the Social Security Administration.

Ultimately, the key point is that a client’s Social Security statement can provide an advisor with valuable information, help clients to better understand their future potential Social Security Retirement Benefits (or fix their projected benefits if historical earnings are missing!), and serve as a launching point for deeper conversations with the client to explore how they can meet their financial planning goals!

#FASuccess Ep 216: The Financial Advisor As Curator And Redefining The Value Of Financial Expertise, With Jason Zweig

February 16, 2021 07:04 am 7 Comments CATEGORY: Financial Advisor Success Podcast

Welcome back to the 216th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast!

My guest on today's podcast is Jason Zweig. Jason is a financial journalist who wrote one of the first books on behavioral finance and neuro-economics and writes the "Intelligent Investor" column for "The Wall Street Journal." What's unique about Jason, though, is his perspective on the financial services industry, having covered it for nearly 25 years, and why he sees the future value proposition of financial advice as being less of an 'expert' and more about the advisor as a 'curator' who identifies the best solutions and systems for clients to get the answers they need.

In this episode, we talk in-depth about the parallels between the fiduciary ethics of financial journalism and financial planning, the difficulties that consumers face in trying to determine who is a credible journalist or credible financial planning expert, and why being able to say, "I don't know," in response to a client's question can actually be viewed as a litmus test for who is really a true expert in the needs of their clients.

We also talk about the evolving value proposition of financial advisors themselves, the behavioral value that advisors can add to their clients beyond just trying to get higher returns, why even the hand-holding value proposition of helping clients manage their behavior could eventually be replaced by technology, and Jason's views on why the AUM model has been so stubbornly persistent, despite decades of naysayers calling for its demise.

And be certain to listen to the end where Jason shares why he doesn't believe financial planning is yet a true profession and what it would take to get there, why he's written a number of sharp, investigative articles about financial advisors and the CFP Board, in particular, over the past decade, and his guidance about where new financial advisors should focus if they want to be successful in the decades to come.

So whether you’re interested in learning more about how Jason views the "art" of giving financial advice, whether he sees advisory fee models changing, or his perspective on whether financial planning is a profession, then we hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast.

Making Financial Advicers Better And More Successful And The State Of The (Nerd’s Eye View) Blog

February 15, 2021 07:04 am 17 Comments CATEGORY: Nerd's Eye View

2020 was an incredibly disruptive year for nearly everyone. From the health toll of the pandemic itself to the economic impact of social distancing, the business disruption of work-from-home to the personal disruption of schooling-from-home, last year was a year of change for nearly everyone, whether they wanted it or not. And while the financial services industry escaped relatively unscathed with a sharp V-shaped recovery – particularly in contrast to the damaging impact of the 2008-2009 financial crisis and the recession that followed – financial advisors were not exempt from the forces of change that rolled through. A shift we felt particularly acutely at Kitces.com, with the total shut-down of in-person conferences (to which we previously had traveled on a weekly basis throughout the year!), paired with an explosion of virtual webinar events and a newfound hunger amongst the advisor community for (quality) online education.

In fact, as we look to the “State of the Blog” in 2021, the ironic reality is that last year was one of record growth for Kitces.com, with our Nerd’s Eye View blog readership marking new highs, our Members Section experiencing more-than-100% growth (as we added more new members last year than we did in the first 10 years, cumulatively!), and the Kitces team that keeps it all running behind-the-scenes more than doubling as well (to a total of 15 now, including yours truly!).

Yet even as Kitces.com had the good fortune to be able to grow rapidly amidst a challenging year, it has also helped us crystalize that, like any business that envisions being a ‘Small Giant’ (which Bo Burlingham defines as companies that try to be the Greatest instead of just being the Biggest), it’s impossible to serve everyone. Instead, we have to maintain a clear focus on who it is that we serve best, and focus our services and resources for them.

And so I’m excited to announce an update to our Mission at Kitces.com, which is now about “Making Financial Advicers Better, And More Successful”.

What’s a “Financial Advicer” you may be asking? Simply put, a financial advicer is someone who is actually in the business of financial advice itself, and whose compensation (whatever the form) is for that advice. Which matters, because it means that when you’re a Financial Advicer, the product isn’t the product. The advice itself, and the advicer delivering it, are the “product” that the client is purchasing. Accordingly, Financial Advicers recognize that it’s essential to continue learning and developing their own knowledge, as a means of reinvesting into and upgrading and increasing the value potential of the advice that they can deliver to their clients. And that’s who Kitces.com aims to serve.

In the coming years, our mission of “Making Financial Advicers Better, and More Successful” will come across four domains: Education for Financial Advicers in the form of the Nerd’s Eye View blog daily content; Resources to help Financial Advicers find (the right) solutions from our Master Conference List to our new CFP Scholarships List and our popular AdvisorTech Map; Research in the form of original studies on what Financial Advicers really do in delivering advice and being successful; and Training to develop the skills that Financial Advicers need to succeed, as embodied by the recent launch of our (first of many to come) Kitces Courses on “How To Review A Tax Return To Find Planning Opportunities”.

2020 was a challenging year for most, and there was no exception at Kitces.com as our value proposition and business model, too, had to adapt to the pandemic and its impact. Yet in the end, just as the industry was itself already in the midst of a shift from sales to advice, the pandemic has in so many ways simply caused the ‘future’ to arrive more quickly than most anticipated. Which means the 2020s are increasingly shaping up to be the decade of the financial advicer, and fortunately we’ve been able to emerge from the pandemic stronger and in a better position than ever to serve the financial advicer community. I couldn’t be more excited about what’s ahead for the business of financial advice and serving all of you, our Financial Advicer readers, in the years to come!

Weekend Reading for Financial Planners (Feb 13-14)

February 12, 2021 02:56 pm 2 Comments CATEGORY: Weekend Reading

Enjoy the current installment of "Weekend Reading For Financial Planners" – this week's edition kicks off with the announcement that the Investments & Wealth Institute (IWI) is launching a new online advisor networking/community platform called "The Hive", to be available to both IWI members and those beyond, as the organization seeks to expand its footprint beyond its roots of CIMA and CPWA certificants into a more FPA-style "open tent" association for financial advisors.

Also in the news this week are a number of other notable industry headlines, including:

The latest Cerulli Associates data showing the largest broker-dealers are getting even bigger, with the top-25 broker-dealers now accounting for nearly 72% of brokers and a whopping 90% of all IBD assets (up from just 58% and 83%, respectively, a decade ago)
A new study of TAMPs showing that investment outsourcing continues to rise, though while TAMPs started in the independent broker-dealer channel, it's now RIAs leading their growth

From there, we have several articles on investment management:

The ongoing rise of direct indexing is now gaining enough traction that index providers are scrambling to figure out how to license their indices to the emerging direct indexing platforms
The complexity and opacity of alternative investments isn't doing much to slow their growth, but is spawning rapid growth in the CAIA designation for advisors who want to learn more about how to properly exercise due diligence regarding alternative investments
A Morningstar analysis on whether Bitcoin is really a good idea to hold (or "HODL"!) in a client's portfolio given its dramatic volatility

We've also included a number of marketing-related articles, including:

How using the word "if" turns prospect pitches into awkward leading questions and why using open-ended questions is better
Why it may be better to make your advisor marketing less rational and more emotionally driven
Rethinking the business development process to better highlight how the advisor brings expertise to the table to identify less-than-obvious problems and provide less-than-obvious solutions

We wrap up with three final articles, all around the theme of being more flexible to a changing world and making mistakes:

The difficulties of planning for your long-term future amidst a world with such uncertainty, and how a "micro-planning" approach can help
Given that every successful person has a lot of mistakes to share, perhaps it's time for us to get less fearful of making mistakes and more focused on simply learning from them?
Why it's a good idea to deliberately put yourself in situations where something may go wrong... because in the end, it's far easier to "practice failure" in a controlled environment than to risk it in the moments that matter most

Enjoy the 'light' reading!

Kitces & Carl Ep 53: Using Financial Plan Proposals To Show Planning Value To Prospective Clients

February 11, 2021 07:05 am 6 Comments CATEGORY: Kitces & Carl Podcast

The evolution of advisor technology in recent decades has made it easier and easier for financial advisors to build (and manage) systematized model portfolios for a large number of clients. The good news of this shift is that it has greatly facilitated the scalability of advisory firms. The bad news, though, is that it centered the advisory firm’s value proposition around the portfolio, as the firm’s resources were literally focused on “investment management”. And in turn, to help convert the prospects to clients, advisors learned to create beautifully designed marketing brochures, “investment decks”, and engaged proposal generation tools to show why their bespoke portfolios were better than all the other bespoke portfolios out there.

However, as the industry has continued to evolve towards a more holistic and service-based (i.e., intangible) approach to the financial planning process (and away from such a focus on investment management and the attendant performance expectations), advisors often struggle with illustrating the increasingly financial-planning-centric value that they offer (often over the course of decades) to their clients. Which, in turn, raises the question: Is there such a thing as a “financial planning proposal”, or something similar that financial advisors can give to prospective clients in an initial meeting to illustrate how great all this ‘financial planning stuff’ really is?

In our 43rd episode of Kitces & Carl, Michael Kitces and financial advisor communication expert Carl Richards talk about the importance of meeting prospective clients where they are and asking good initial questions, creating a preliminary financial planning proposal and deliverable (and what that might include), and how to provide an even more substantial piece of supporting material that can help advisors show prospects what value they can expect to receive from the financial planning process.

As a starting point, it’s important to recognize that, in order for a prospect to decide to hire an advisor, the advisor needs to have asked the right questions to uncover and understand the specific pain point that prompted the prospect to book a first meeting. As it’s the clear understanding of this pain point as a motivator that led the client to take action that the advisor must address in a financial planning proposal (and communicate back to the prospect to make them feel they’ve been heard!).

From there, the advisor can create a one-page plan that lays out what the key issues are, which might include a preliminary statement of purpose, a list of initial goals that have been identified, and a 90-day action plan to start down the proverbial financial planning road. The key is to understand that prospective clients care far less about specific solutions than knowing that someone understands their problems (and can help them work towards a solution). Additionally, advisors can supplement that one-page plan with a full sample financial plan, which can really help prospects understand what exactly they will be getting, why the fees are what they are, and what the financial planning process really means (beyond what they may have encountered in prior experiences).

Ultimately, the key point is that the days of glossy brochures full of Morningstar reports and stock photos of compasses and lighthouses may not be as relevant as they were when an advisor’s main value proposition was investment management. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t valuable deliverables that advisors can use to help demonstrate the sort of value that prospective clients can expect. And at the end of the day, tools that help clients decide to move forward and engage a financial planner not only help them solve the problem that they came in to get solved in the first place but can expand further into a holistic financial planning engagement… and also help advisors grow their businesses in the process, too!