Welcome to October, blog subscribers! We all know what this time of the year means for holidays.
What, fall? Halloween? Pumpkins? No, no — October is Financial Planning Month! (Congratulations, you now have a month named after you.)
While a time for industry-wide celebration, Financial Planning Month also means that the end of the year is just around the corner. At this time, financial advisors face a number of opportunities to help their clients with what may be your most important job: starting the important conversations.
Turning Financial Stressors into Financial Opportunities
Financial stress can come in many different forms, depending on one’s situation. Almost always, it involves feeling overwhelmed or underinformed about the state of one’s finances. If you don’t know how much money you should allocate to charity or how much principle will go toward taxes, it’s markedly harder to know how much money you should have.
An experienced, knowledgeable financial advisor can act as a sort of financial therapist, a reliable and educated source who can look at problems from the outside and provide solutions clients may not have considered. It’s hard to look at one’s situation from within, since everything is too familiar.
The most common fear, for instance, is not having enough, either for a future retirement or for your needs today. As a financial advisor, you probably hear questions along the lines of: Will we have enough money in an emergency? What if I get laid off? What if markets go down? These questions are easy opportunities to start important conversations–and to demonstrate that you have your clients’ issues in mind.
The 5 Year-End Planning Conversations Every Advisor Should Be Starting
With the onset of financial stress comes the opportunities to calm them. Taking the initiative on a complex conversation ahead of time shows clients there’s nothing to be worried about; the right steps are being taken to not only maintain the principal, but help it grow into a reliable stream of retirement income.
Tax Planning Reviews
You can always rely on taxes to create stress points for your clients. From entering new tax brackets and stock obligations to business and professional concerns, there’s no shortage of quirks one can face from the tax code as they retire. Encouraging a review of someone’s current tax situation both reduces anxiety of the unknown and creates opportunities to optimize a client’s income and hedge it against a potential tax burden.
Beneficiary Reviews
Who gets what? can quickly become a contentious question, and can, if not settled concretely, spiral into a years’ long legal battle. (Charles Dickens needed almost a thousand pages to tell the story of one such battle.) Talking about beneficiaries today can save clients a world of trouble down the road, especially if they’re not sure how they’d like to divvy up their principle. These are also good opportunities to discover and recommend particular strategies (i.e. trusts) to best pass a client’s money along.
Estate Plan Reviews
With a consideration as large as one’s entire estate, stress is bound to flare. It’s another case of “what goes where,” but with even more potential obstacles, hidden costs, and procedural requirements. A wide-ranging conversation about the state of a client’s estate corrals all the variables into a single, cohesive plan — which means your clients can have all their considerations in the palm of their hand.
Charitable Giving Discussions
While a more wholesome form of stress, deciding where one’s money can help the best is still a stressor. What charities do your clients want to support? Should one charity take priority over another? What’s the simplest, most effective way to donate? A conversation today creates the most satisfactory avenues for charitable giving, as well as opportunities to create tax breaks and therefore a more solid overall portfolio.
Business-Owner Tax Conversations
If some of your clients happen to own businesses, they’ll have particular financial considerations you should address. Whether its employee benefits, defining a line of succession, or state-level business taxes, clients need to know where their company stands before they stand down.
Of course, the conversation never stops over at the Impact Partnership YouTube page. There, you can check out our series Impactful Conversations, bringing you real, unfiltered stories, battle-tested strategies, and insider insights from top financial advisors who’ve already had the conversations you need to begin.
