We want to underscore how important it is to think of your wealth as going well beyond the dollars involved. A true wealth advisor goes deep – into the realm of your critical values, relationships, and lifelong dreams.
We will ask more questions like “What is important to you? Where do you want to go with your life and with your wealth?” rather than “Where are your assets held?” This type of advisor listens to what their clients have to say. It is a continuing dialog where we help you connect the decisions you make with your money with your life.
As Carl Richards, the Sketch Guy at Behavior Gap, expresses in this video, “We see past the spreadsheet to understand your most important dreams and goals.” Carl articulates so well how we see our relationship with our clients. It’s a fresh approach to wealth management by combining your investments, your relationships and your advanced planning needs into a unified whole. We hope you’ll check out this video and let us know what you think … and what’s really important to you and your personal wealth.
Any journey, you’ve got to be clear about where you’re starting from. Then we got to say, well are we going. People don’t normally come to us thinking, “I want you to help me get really clear about my goals.” In fact I had this great experience with a friend of mine who was a retired investment banker and he said he’d gone to all the big banks and brokerage firms and asked for help and he came to me and he said, “You know the big problem with your industry- lumping us in with everybody else- is nobody has actually tied the decisions I’m making with my dollars, my investments, and my life.” Which was of course, a shock to me, because that’s all we do.
Then it’s not a spreadsheet to us. It’s simply a dialogue about trying to figure out what’s really important to you. People often find themselves in our offices saying, “Help me, I need help investing this money.” It might be in my 401(k) or I’ve got a big goal, but something you got to help me solve this now. That seems really technical. First let’s get really clear about why? What’s the piece? What’s the piece that really matters? How do we find the really important stuff, foundational it’s the core of what we do. I actually don’t know how else you to do that than with a really great advisor having that dialogue with you.
It’s just a natural human bias to not sit down and plan for the future. These are human tendencies and so imagine if instead of anxiety about the uncertain future, you get to this spot where you’re clear about where you are today. You have a clear set of goals at least in terms of where we think we’re headed. We’ve now got a process in place for getting there. Now you’ve identified a set of goals that you said were important to you like spending more time with your kids and then we literally have the ability to let go. The anxiety goes away and now you found you can actually go do some of the things you identified as your goals. I don’t know what’s that worth. I don’t know what could be more valuable.
All of our clients. They’re successful disciplined people, smart successful disciplined people. Sometimes one of the most challenging roles we have is to get them to flip that switch. To realize, “Wait you can now go do some of those things you’ve told us are super important.” That’s why we’ve been doing this. We’re saying, “Look you’ve been telling me for 10 years that your goal is to travel more.” We’re there brother, take the trip. Put the golf shoes on, go do some of those things you’ve been telling us. That’s why we’ve been doing this work. The reality is we see past the spreadsheet to this set of your most important dreams and goals.
