Three Things Every Financial Advisor Should Do
By the time you are reading this I will have completed my first quarter meetings with all of my clients. As a reminder, we meet four times a year, with certain topics covered at each of these meetings. Because of this, I felt it was worth sharing the three things your advisor should be doing every year. This is just my humble opinion, in no particular order. And here is a video link if that is easier.
- Taxes:
- This is kind of a broad topic, but the key here is your advisor should be asking for your tax return each and every year. Most clients want their advisors to help them with tax planning, but a minority of advisors even bother asking for the returns annually.
- I am in an extremely small group of advisors who are both a Certified Financial Planner and also an Enrolled Agent. I have the latter designation as it is the highest credential awarded by the IRS and I do a TON of tax planning work with clients.
- Financial Plan Update/Investment Rebalancing:
- I combined what may be considered two separate things into one, with a reason why.
- Reworking your investments without having a financial plan is like buying a plane ticket without knowing where you want to go, or buying a car before you can drive.
- Imagine if you had changed your retirement timeline, but the investments did not reflect this because there was no care given to your financial plan. That is a potential disaster scenario waiting to happen.
- Regardless, the financial plan needs to be updated before you start rebalancing/adjusting your investments. Otherwise, you are putting the cart ahead of the horse in my opinion.
- One Question:
- The first meeting of the year includes one simple, but incredibly important question.
- I can think of all kinds of stuff a client should work on during the year, but if they are not the most important things the clients want to do, they are useless.
- Something I ask at the end of each meeting is whether the client finds the meeting helpful. By knowing what a client wants to focus on this year we can structure the remaining meetings and activities to accomplish said goal.
- It is a weird concept putting the client first😉
That’s it. Three things your advisor should be doing every year. Maybe it is easier for me to accomplish this as I only work with physicians and we also meet quarterly as opposed to once or twice a year. All I know is my select group of clients seem to appreciate it.