About Planning

Are You Afraid to Talk to a Financial Planner?

Maria Nemeth is a US coach who has worked in the money arena for nearly 30 years. She is the founder and creative director of the Academy for Coaching Excellence. Her book, The Energy of Money, has been published in five languages.

Yesterday she led a packed day-long workshop for financial planners organised by the West Midlands Branch of the Institute of Financial Planning. Maria started with the premise that clients are looking for a relationship with their financial planners. Specifically, they want someone whom they can trust to listen to them talk about money issues in their lives. They want a planner to whom they can talk candidly about their past money mistakes and want advice on how to prevent similar mistakes in the future.

Whilst coaching encourages clients to concentrate on working to do things right and well, Maria proposed that it takes great courage to take that first step of visiting a financial planner as any meaningful visit will involve a degree of open acknowledgement of past mistakes, often a painful experience.

As we at Planning for Life strive to make financial planning more accessible, Maria has posed some interesting questions to which we seek answers:

Do you, as a consumer, really want a deep, long term relationship with a financial planner?
Would you prefer to do your own planning, using a financial adviser to carry out transactions on your instruction?
Are you worried that you will have to “fess-up” to poor past financial decisions?
Are you afraid to visit a financial planner?
What do you want from a financial planner before you would be happy to arrange a visit?

We would welcome your responses and thoughts.

Thank you.

Life coaching is great, but what about the money?

In a previous article we asked:

Do consumers want long term relationships with their planner?
Are consumers afraid to visit a financial planner?

Phil Calvert, founder of IFA Life, says in his "This is when I'll pay for financial advice" article that consumers should positively embrace a visit to a planner in spite of any short term pain and should relish a deep relationship with their planner.

"Whilst exams, qualifications and remuneration seem to be at the heart of the professionalism debate, I’d venture to suggest that they are not the key issues for the profession to focus on. Qualifications are merely your ticket to the game, and if the RDR paper is anything to go by, the remuneration issue is finally put to bed. Which means that we can now focus on what professionalism is really all about – how we engage with clients. New Model Shirt is at one end of the scale; George Kinder is at the other.

"In my thirty one years working with IFAs and financial planners (and now Life Planners), with the exception of procedural process dictated by regulation, I have to admit to having seen little change in the way we engage with clients. ‘Knowing your client’ sounds like common-sense to most reasonable people, but I wonder just how seriously this is embraced beyond filling in boxes on a fact find.

"Well, if you know anything about George Kinder’s methodology, you’ll have grasped that that knowing your client takes on a completely different and fundamentally deeper meaning. In fact, it was suggested to me last week that when a client doesn’t proceed with recommendations you have made to them, it is only because YOU the financial adviser have failed to truly understand the client’s motivations and goals. You asked all the questions on the fact find, you ticked all the boxes, you did your research, you made your recommendations, the client made the right noises – but they still didn’t follow your advice.

"What happened? Client inertia? Price? A friend in the pub suggested a different solution? Or was it because you never really got deep under the skin of the client to uncover what really drives them as a human being?

"Anyone who deals with money is under immense scrutiny right now – whether ‘greedy bankers’, MPs, financial advisers or whoever. All are quite rightly searching for ways to enhance the perception of their trustworthiness and credibility, and at the end of the day that will be determined by how each interacts with their customers.

"Now if you want to call George Kinder’s methodology ‘life coaching’ that’s fine with me, but if a graduate of the Kinder Institute helps me to uncover my deepest and most profound goals – and can actually help me achieve them, frankly I don’t care what it’s called. But to be clear, life coaches as we know them do not normally (and are not qualified to) help with your financial affairs, and it will be a financial planner’s skill with money which will help to translate life goals into reality. It’s called Life Planning – not Life Coaching."

Does that help you, a potential or actual consumer of financial planning services, feel less scared of financial planning - or more?

"Genuine Care" Must Be at the Centre of our Service to Clients

You may be financially solvent, but are you "solvent in mind and soul" and if not, who are you going to call? This is the groundbreaking question raised by Susan Galvan in her recent post, "A Fiduciary of the Heart" on the FPA's Future of Planning blog. Its a stunning question and Susan's answer hits the nail on the head.

Galvan is a thought leader in the field of life and financial planning and her article gets right to the core of the argument of what we are all doing in the planning profession; it is also timely as it adds to the debate we have been developing on this blog about services, fees and professional relationships. Particularly, it provides both a reason for consumers' fear of visiting a planner, as well as setting out an answer.

Susan starts off by pointing out that the extreme materialism and consumption of the last decade brought us to the brink of financial Armageddon. However, she goes on to argue that this same extreme materialism and consumption has also brought us to the brink of an “insolvency of mind and soul” as well as a financial insolvency. For Susan, true impoverishment is when we forget our larger purpose, the one that connects us to the wellbeing of the world around us. Susan says that “we know that over-consumption eventually leads to death. You cannot fill an inner emptiness, an insolvency of soul with substances whether food, alcohol, drugs, money or stuff.”

This has deep implications for the client planner relationship. As planners we should truly be in the business of helping our clients become “healthy, wealthy and wise”, not only financially but in their lives as a whole.

For Susan, the crucial question is whether, as planners, we want to enable our clients to "live more amply with greater vision and a finer spirit of hope and achievement or do we just want to manage their money and make our own living in the process of doing so". Interestingly, Susan sees this as being important not only for our clients but for planners themselves.

Susan describes a simple strategy that will facilitate enriching our clients’ lives – and our own – in what really matters. She suggests we should get to know them in depth, providing genuine care for them as we come to know them in a very deep way. In our deep conversations with our clients we become a "fiduciary for the heart as well as the financial assets".

As we’ve noted time and time again, money is one of the most emotional things we have to deal with. We have always argued that you can’t deal with money on its own. You have to deal with its reason in our lives as well. This is so fundamental that once consumers realise what we do they will not only lose their fear of coming to see a financial planner, but positively embrace it, a trend we have seen at Planning for Life. They will find real value in the fees that they pay for our "genuine care" and advice. The holistic approach that Susan describes should not only increase the number of people wishing to visit a financial planner, but the subsequent demand created will ultimately pull more advisers and planners back into the profession.

Planning Your Financial Resources

Financial planning is the only tool that can take your existing personal and financial resources, and arrange them to achieve your dream of freedom in the most efficient and fastest way.

At Planning for Life we can help you develop financial planning policies and strategies to achieve your goals. We will help you deal with the beliefs and blocks that can hold you back, and give you the technical knowledge you need to manage your financial resources effectively.

Our sophisticated financial planning software allows you to look at the financial impact of decisions you might take towards achieving the dream of freedom you have developed earlier.

We will cover the full range of financial issues with you, including:

Cash flow, budgeting and liability management
Balance sheet and asset allocation
Investment
Risk management
Pension planning
Tax planning
Estate planning

We can help you develop formal written statements of financial planning policies to ensure you stay on course in a turbulent and uncertain world. We will develop the most appropriate financial strategies for the efficient execution of your plan.

Planning your financial resources

Financial planning is the only tool that can take your existing personal and financial resources, and arrange them to achieve your dream of freedom in the most efficient and fastest way.

At Planning for Life we can help you develop financial planning policies and strategies to achieve your goals. We will help you deal with the beliefs and blocks that can hold you back, and give you the technical knowledge you need to manage your financial resources effectively.

Our sophisticated financial planning software allows you to look at the financial impact of decisions you might take towards achieving the dream of freedom you have developed earlier.

We will cover the full range of financial issues with you, including:

Cash flow, budgeting and liability management
Balance sheet and asset allocation
Investment
Risk management
Pension planning
Tax planning
Estate planning

We will help you implement your plan and guide you towards the accomplishment of your goals in the most efficient and fastest way possible.

We will always be there for you when you need help and support. We will also carry out an annual review with you so that you can look at the progress you are making towards your goals. We may also carry out interim reviews for you.

We will review your investments and asset allocation at regular intervals and recommend changes if necessary.