In The Three Mega-Trends in Wealth Management, I made the case that three important things need to happen in the financial services industry:
Wealth management is about understanding at a deeper level what an individual's predisposition is to money. For that reason, as financial consultants, we ask a lot of questions on the front end of our relationships. One of our team’s favorite questions is: “What is one of your first memories about money from when you were growing up?”
Sometimes it takes a while to process an answer to that question, but what gets said is always revealing.
One answer I once heard was: “One of my first memories of money is a vivid slow-motion scene I’ll never forget. I was about 10 years old, and I was sitting on the couch with my eight-year-old brother. That, by itself, wasn’t so unusual, of course. What was unusual was that the couch was on our front lawn. As we were sitting there, I remember seeing one of my classmates, in the back seat of his parents’ car, pointing and laughing at us. You see, we had been kicked out of our third rental house for falling behind on the rent. I will never put my children through that humiliation.”
All I could say when I heard that was “Wow!” Do you think that story might possibly influence how we plan for his family’s financial future? Yeah, me too!
Our industry loves the “X’s and O’s” of planning and investments. (We love it, too!) But understanding our clients' back stories is the most important step of the planning process.
Our mission is to help families thrive across generations by connecting their money with their purpose. We can’t do that unless we first understand where they came from and
then try to help them unpack where they want to go. We enjoy the process of capturing a family’s narrative so we can do a better job of connecting their past with a plan for the future.