Financial Planners. What things in your life and future would look and feel different if you chose to take a different perspective on them, to attach a different meaning to them? Take Personal Financial Planning. Imagine if we unlearnt what we learnt. What if what you’re doing is not Personal Financial Planning.
Possibly what you do, what you think is right, what you have been taught, what you are told is the international standard, that’s not personal financial planning.
Potentially where you look at the PRISM needs, protection + retirement + investment + savings and mortgage needs, that is not planning. When you do shortfall analysis or needs analysis that is not planning. Where you look to accumulate and protect during working life and crystallise and decumulate in retirement with surplus succeeded, that is not planning either. When you follow the ISO 22222 and
- Establishing and defining the client and personal financial planner relationship.
- Gathering client data and determining goals and expectations.
- Analysing and evaluating the client’s financial status.
- Developing and presenting the financial plan.
- Implementing the financial planning recommendations.
- Monitoring the financial plan and the financial planning relationship.
That’s not planning either.
Perhaps all of that is simply working out how to sell product.
Would not these be the ways of the product sellers?
Product selling is an exchange. The client gives you their wealth, and in return you give a piece of paper and a promise. You take away the client’s wealth, for safe keeping let’s say.
If that is the case. Product selling is where you take wealth from the client hold on to it as long as possible to take your cut. You might give it them back. You might give it to someone else.
You don’t create wealth. You simply hang on to it and deduct a fee. Here’s the thing … maybe that is not planning!
Questioning your perspective from time to time can be a good thing. It allows you to see beyond your normal habits and ruts.
Do you know what personal financial planning is?
You did it on yourself when you set up your business. You did a three-year cash flow forecast to work out how much money you would make. You did that to create wealth for yourself.
Now do that for your client.
Not for the wealthy 5% … who already have over £100,000 thresholds of assets for you to tap into.
But for the 95% you reject in your financial planning business. The unwealthy.
I hear you say you made your client wealthy. Don’t point to your client and say you made them wealthy with your planning. You chose the wealthy. A selection bias, not an outcome of your service.
So you could have the yacht in the marina, saying look what I have done … you can do this too with my service.
Imagine if you used your personal financial planning skills to create wealth for the unwealthy.
Here you unlearn your old ways. Learn new ways.
Picture this. You place a wall between advice and product and talk to the unwealthy.
You discover that three-fifths have savings of less than £5,000, two-thirds have no life insurance or other protection cover, one-third have no private pension.
You say this is an advice gap. This is a product gap. You look at this and think more people should have product. You try to solve it. You try to sell product. STOP! That is not the way.
Imagine if product was unnecessary for the unwealthy.
What if no product creates wealth. Products manage and distribute wealth. Products diminish wealth today, with a promise for wealth tomorrow.
In the meantime. You, the product company, the taxman, deduct your fees.
Imagine if the answer was simple and staring you in the face. What if what the unwealthy need is …
… wealth.
Would you then ditch your product selling processes?
Would that not be the best thing you can do in this global economic and medical crisis?
Plan the person not the money.
Plan to create wealth for the unwealthy.
Use their values, gifts & talents, and their dreams, coupled with their entrepreneurial spirit and drive, and use you skills and knowledge to draw up a plan to create wealth for them. And, put the “Business of You” into your lifetime cash flow forecast instead of a product.
For a drastically different perspective, try non-intermediating financial planning for a few weeks or months. This will expose you to new insights, people, and experiences.
If you want to become a non-intermediating financial planner for an immersive experience in a different worldview, contact us today to find out how the Academy of Life Planning can help you transition from Financial Intermediary to Non-Intermediating Financial Planning firm.
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