What Clients Want From Advisors, But Aren't Getting!

I’m going with another short article this week. The title kind of gives the general concept away, but I figure we can dig into more details on what clients actually want and are not getting from their financial advisors. There are two areas I want to focus on here.

And a little background. This information comes from various studies within my world. So, it isn’t just my opinion. Well, some of the reasons why are my opinion. But what can you do😉

Let’s look at item number one. 90% of surveyed clients said they want their advisors to do tax planning. Advisors agreed to this at roughly the same 90% rate. Unfortunately, less than 1/3 of advisors do tax planning let alone even ask for their clients’ tax returns every year.

This really shouldn’t surprise me, but it does. I started years ago at Merrill Lynch and in our training we never talked about taxes nor tax planning. Heck, one person I started with was a CPA and he wasn’t even permitted to talk taxes.

August is when I do deep tax planning with my clients. And by “deep tax planning” I mean lots more than just reviewing last year’s return. Instead, we start looking at things yet to be done this year and years forward. We all know the current tax structure will be going away in just over a year. Without a financial planner who does deep tax planning there will be lots of tips going to Uncle Sam starting soon.

Oh, and just so you know how serious I am about tax planning, I pursued my Enrolled Agent designation, which is the highest credential from the IRS.

Area number two. And these numbers are worse. 96% of clients want their advisors to help them with transferring wealth while still alive. Only 24% of clients surveyed said they get this type of advice from their advisors.

Again, this is something I do via not only my deep tax planning work but also through the advanced financial planning training all my clients complete. This can take different forms such as buying a kid a tractor for their property (recent example). The reality is every single one of my clients would like help in transferring wealth while still alive.

And part of the reason I think this number is lower is because most advisors are paid based on the assets they manage. I have seen firsthand how these sorts of advisors do NOT want to see wealth transferred as it reduces their pay 😠

That’s it for today’s article and useless information. Enjoy your holiday weekend and we will get back into deeper topics next week!