Were you once a financial planner? Do you enjoy working with people, but not the regulation? Do you feel you have a few more years left in you? Could you do with the extra money?
If yes, setting up as a Non-Intermediating Financial Planner could be for you.
When you remove products from the equation, the whole client-planner dynamic changes. Many people think that what you do before selling a financial product is financial planning. That’s compliance. And people expect that for free. What your client will pay for is very different.
Here are the top ten must-haves for your value-adding NIFP service.
1: Know Your Client
Sounds straightforward and familiar. But we are not talking fact finds here. Here’s the thing. How can you know the client who doesn’t know themselves?
You can begin the planning process with self-discovery questions. We identify values and gifts. From which we determine life purpose. The true goal is to use skills in the service of others according to our values.
Self-knowledge makes a life worth living. The challenge for everyone is to know our true selves and live in balance accordingly. I call it checking we are facing the right direction before we begin.
2: Set Inspiring Goals
People aren’t inherently lazy; they fail to set inspiring goals.
If people don’t set their own goals, others will set goals for them. And what’s in it for them. Not much! Allow the client to set their own goals and make sure they are inspiring. Inspiring comes from in spirit.
The greatest regret is to live the life others expect of you and not have the courage to live a life true to yourself.
3: Think Whole-Person
Balance is key. Imbalance causes suffering.
Often people set off to achieve success in one area at the expense of failure in another. For example, many choose to pursue wealth at the expense of health and happiness.
The whole-person paradigm understands that we are multi-faceted beings. We are mind, body, heart, and spirit. Failure in one aspect is a failure in all.
Balance helps you live long and prosper.
4: Plan Your Client
Most planners know about life coaching and life planning – aiming to plan the client before planning the money. Money is a means to an end and not an end in itself. The point is the life you want to live. Plan your client.
It would help if you were a coach and a planner. A coach is someone whose job is to teach people to improve in life. A planner is someone who makes plans. If you want to improve things, you need a coach; if you’re going to achieve goals, you need a plan. Goals without plans are just dreams.
The crucial point is, the client is at place A; they want to get to a different place B, and need a plan to get from A to B.
If your client doesn’t want change, walk away.
5: Plan Your Project
If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Let the plan do the work. Use project planning and management skills from business to up the ante and meet the bar. Don’t lower the bar to satisfy the ante.
6: Remove Asset Bias
The conversation stops being just about financial assets and starts to be about all holdings. We become asset-neutral and asset-friendly – removing all asset bias. We talk about property, businesses, occupational pensions, physical assets, non-regulated financial assets, do-it-yourself financial assets, intellectual property, and more.
It would help if you learned about these assets and how to plan them.
7: Forecast Wealth
Wealth will outlive people, or people will outlive wealth. It would help if you had a lifetime wealth forecast to know which one.
Unfortunately, the popular forecasting tools are for one-to-one meetings with a planner.
It would be best to have a user-centred planning tool for groups or as part of a Netflix-style subscription. That’s why we launched HapNav. The happiness navigator.
We put the tools in the hands of people.
8: Create Wealth
Nine in ten people have insufficient wealth for future financial security or freedom. The planning community underserves this group. What this market need is more wealth. Business plans create wealth, not products.
The plan might include a business plan that gives the best revenue growth for the least risk of failure. What the client needs is a solid proposition development framework.
9: Educate
Today, financial assets are commodities. Hand-holding is non-intermediating financial planning.
Technology can do intermediation for free in seconds. Do wealth with clients, not for them.
10: Execute
Execution is where those coaching skills come in.
These skills are all covered in the Game Plan of the Academy of Life Planning.
For more details, please visit our website.
Academy of Life Planning 