Ep 22: Rebirth of the Proactive Advisor with Philipp Hecker & Dr. Meg Lurtz (Ep 22)

Episode 22 of Rethink Financial Advice, co-hosted by Derek Notman, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Couplr AI) and H. Adam Holt, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Asset-Map). (39:52)

Episode 22 of Rethink Financial Advice, co-hosted by Derek Notman, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Couplr AI) and H. Adam Holt, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Asset-Map). Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or Acast.

Episode Summary

Philipp Hecker and Dr. Meghaan Lurtz join Adam Holt and Derek Notman to make the case that advice has a timing dimension most practices ignore. The observation anchoring the episode is that clients arrive at a pain point rather than ahead of one, showing up two years before a child starts college to ask what a 529 plan is. Hecker’s argument is that proactive advice is both a service improvement and a business one, and he points at the middle and bottom of an advisor’s book as the underserved segment carrying both attrition risk and unrealized revenue. He also shows how the same approach works in prospecting, by asking someone in their late forties whether their current advisor has ever raised catch-up contributions. Lurtz contributes the finding that even advised clients are frequently not actually being advised.

What this episode covers

• Why clients arrive at a pain point rather than ahead of one, and what proactive timing changes
• The middle and bottom of a book as both an attrition risk and an untapped opportunity
• Using specific unasked questions as a prospecting method
• Lurtz on the gap between having an advisor and being advised
• Extending fiduciary thinking to upside rather than only downside protection

Full Transcript

Machine-generated transcript of this episode.

Welcome to Rethink, the financial advisor podcast. My name is Adam Holtz. And this is Derek Notman. We are your hosts, both veteran advisors and FinTech CEOs who challenge the status quo, question everything, and have fun doing it. Hear honest commentary on the challenges facing advisors today, and be part of a community where we can all rethink the profession. Now on to our episode. Derek, does the timing of advice matter? Hey, Adam. I think so. I really actually think it does. If you think about our lives, and just all the milestones that we go through, a lot of them are time and age related, right? You don’t give retirement advice like, hey, here’s how you’re going to retire when you’re 14 years old, right?

That’s not really relevant. So yeah, I think the timing of advice really matters a ton. And I think it’s something as advisors that we can do to further drive value in our whole leading with advice mantra that we talk about. Yeah, so I think it does. What do you think? Well, I think it’s a great question. And of course, as financial advisors, we’re constantly doing analysis based upon future cash flow. We’re thinking about investment over the long term. So we do think about when I need this money, liquidity, short term, mid term, long term, retirement versus college funding. These kinds of questions are very top of mind for almost all financial advisors.

But one of the things that is certainly interesting is the timeliness of advice, and why it matters more in certain moments of one’s, we’ll call it life journey, right? We think about it typically as, oh, I’m about to retire and all of a sudden, advice becomes more urgent, or gosh, I’m at the end of my life and a couple of my friends are passing. I really need to focus on estate planning or kids are about to go to college in a couple of years. All of a sudden, I’m really tense or anxious about education funding. So I don’t know about you, but I found that a lot of clients came to us just before these events.

And so timing really did matter because it inspired them to take action. Is that something you experienced? 100%. In another word, you could call that a pain point, right? They come to us when they have these pain points and like, oh crap, my kids are going to school in two years. What’s a 529 plan? And so I think these things happen and then they come to us like that. But just imagine, Adam, if as advisors, we were proactive with the timing of our advice. But what do you mean by that though? Well, we know when different things happen. We know when your children can legally get a job.

We know when you can apply for different types of benefits. We know when you can take money out of a retirement account. We know how long it takes to do XYZ. So what if we were proactively guiding our clients and even potential clients with these information points, right? So instead of them coming to us like, oh crap, I haven’t done this. They’re like, oh, thank you for telling me I should do this. Now that seems kind of obvious though. I mean, don’t you think that financial professionals are telling their clients that let’s say the annual review, oh, it looks like RMDs are requiring them. Those are required minimum distributions or perhaps there’s a certain tax deadline that they need to meet for catch up contributions, right?

Don’t you think that advisors are telling their clients or are they missing it? I think some are, and I don’t think anyone’s purposely not telling, but let’s face it. If you’ve got 50, 100, 500 clients that you’re managing either solo or as a team, that’s a lot of people. That’s a lot of events that you have to remind. And if you don’t have a great way to manage that and proactively do it and try to automate it, that’s a massive task, massive. And I think at the end of the day, we’re choosing between that and just getting the review meeting scheduled and talking about it at the moment.

There’s only so much time in the day. Yeah. It’s hard to scale this one. I think typically our highest end clients tended to get that more concierge level because we knew that we had to deal with competition. They were a high component of our revenue stream. So we needed to make sure that they got all of that value. But I think it’s true. I think a lot of the, we’ll call the rank and file or the archival clients, the ones that maybe have been with us for a while don’t remain the A’s and B’s, as we would tend to call it historically. They don’t necessarily get the same guidance on an ongoing basis.

And it’s because it’s been difficult to scale it. It’s a great entree because we had a conversation to talk to a couple of leaders to tell us what was the thinking behind bringing in our guests in the rethink tank. Well, these two are well known. They’ve done a lot of actual research around this and have also built a solution to automate and scale this issue. And I’m sure that we’re going to talk about their solution a bit, but I think they’re solving this main pain point of the timing of advice in a way that’s never been solved before. So we’ve got two folks on today.

Philip Hecker. He is the CEO of Bento Engine and a co-founder, awesome dude, Columbia University lecturer, former global head of strategy and business development at JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank. And he’s also a first generation immigrant from Germany. It’s pretty cool. Who’s the other one Adam wants you to introduce? Well, absolutely. So Dr. com. And so we tend to see a lot of her material out there. She’s a PhD in personal financial planning from Kansas State U. And I think given the fact that she’s been so focused on behavioral health, I’m sorry, behavioral finance around this as a board member at the Financial Psychology Institute within Europe, also a lecturer at Columbia, which kind of goes back to the roots of how they know each other.

They’ve both been focusing on this interesting dynamic that you and I just brought up, which is the timing of advice and how you can be proactive. So this is a great opportunity for us to hear from them in our rethink tank. As you all know, it was a great way for us to speed interview us on these individuals as to what they’re thinking and what their unique perspective is and how we can of course use it. So stay tuned for how we actually wrap this up at the end of this interview. You ready, Derek? Do it. All right. So Meg, you have a very interesting background, academic, consultative, done a lot of work in the area of personal finance and financial therapy.

What’s your perspective or opinion of the financial advice market today? Well, I think our industry has come a long way and I believe we’re continuing to move forward. More and more advisors are shifting away from selling products and towards the idea of leading with advice. And while I do believe a lot has been accomplished, we also have to recognize that there’s still a lot to do. There’s a lot that’s still left on the table. com that was carried out by Edward Jones, fidelity and Vanguard that shows that 68% of Americans pass without a will. It’s a lot. 64% don’t know what a 529 plan is as a mom.

That’s kind of scary. And then only 10, you know, between 10 and 15% of those eligible to make catch up contributions upon turning age 50, they’re not, you know, very few people are doing that. So I think it’s, you know, it’s clear that as an industry we can do better. And it’s probably really even maybe more interesting or to particular to your readers or to your listeners being financial planners. This gap is not confined to just America at large. Even wealthy advice clients are not getting all of the advice that they deserve. Myself, Philip, together with another colleague, Dr. Kata Kota, we fielded some primary client research that focused on older Americans.

So they were 62 and older. They were wealthy and that they were the top half of the income. And they were in advised relationships and that they had spoken with a live human advisor within the past six months. And what we found in talking to them might surprise you in that 60% of those clients are not getting advice on catch up contributions upon turning age 50. 63% of advised clients are not getting advice on QCDs upon turning 70 and a half. And 94% of families report that they did not receive guidance on working papers or setting up a custodial IRA for their kids upon turning age 14.

So, you know, my view of the US market today, you know, again, I believe we’re moving forward, but there is so much room still for improvement. Fascinating statistics, and I hope that we can link to some type of resource for folks that can actually get access to that because I mean, it’s almost mind-boggling that the percentages are so high. Yeah, yeah, we were pretty shocked. We didn’t know what we were going to find, but that was pretty startling. It’s fascinating. And we’re happy to make the underlying research available in your show notes. Brilliant. Thank you. Yeah, we’ll connect in there for sure for everybody. For Adam and I, I think we’re up to four and a half listeners now.

5. 5. Bill, the question for you, what is the missing opportunity or upcoming challenge that you think advisors are not addressing or aren’t even aware that’s coming? Good question, Derek. Well, I would say those stats that Dr. Lourdes just shared are certainly sobering and should serve as a call to action for all of us. Today, many advisors have the promise of some sort of holistic or comprehensive advice as part of their value prop when they market themselves. And many of you do advise at least your best clients on key age milestones such as Medicare, QCDs or RMDs. But as we’ve just heard, not all of us are doing that important work for all of our clients.

Now, let’s reframe that advice gap into an opportunity. We would love for our audience to reflect about your very best client relationships. When you think about those relationships at the top of your book, my hunch is that you are in frequent touch with them and serve them on many, if not all, the advice needs that they have. Now, reflect honestly, if you will, on some relationships in the middle and even at the bottom of your books. Probably, you do not engage with those clients as frequently or as meaningfully. The middle and bottom of your book is probably underserved and represents not only a risk for attrition, but also a major untapped revenue growth opportunity.

And by the way, it is not only beneficial to lead with advice when serving your clients, we can use it effectively when prospecting as well. Think about it. From Meg, we have just learned how even advised clients are not always being advised. So perhaps, when you have prospects in the late 40s, ask them if their current advisor has discussed catch up contributions with them. And if you have prospects in the late 60s that are philanthropically inclined, perhaps you be the one to introduce them to the power of QCDs. Yes, leading with advice works in prospecting too. Well, Philip, it really sounds like this challenge is an opportunity in disguise, maybe.

So for advisors not leading with advice, not paying attention to this stuff, they have got major potential issues with their book of business. But if they just foot the mindset and start doing what you are saying, and Adam, I have talked about this tons of times about leading with advice, all of a sudden, now this challenge becomes a massive opportunity. Exactly, Derek, in particular, if and when advisors use technology such as AssetMap, Avento, to give them leverage, to give them scale and bring the great work that maybe they used to do manually for their very best clients. Using technology, they can bring more of that magic to more of their clients, benefiting those who matter most, clients and their outcomes, and by virtue of that, their business as well.

I can’t help but think, and I think there are some really great comments here, most of us in advice know this to be true. Everything that has been said, we kind of know in our gut. We know that we probably are taking care of some clients better than others, and the revenue model justifies it. Those that require and expect higher service, turnover is more expensive in the higher network. As much as we have heard how do we actually take action on this? Meg, thinking about what has already been shared, what action steps would you make or would you recommend taking for us to rethink? Yeah, one thing, and people probably have heard this before, but being my background and interest in client psychology and relationships between clients and their advisors, clients don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.

And so leading with that hyper-focused, personalized, impactful advice that is beyond investing is the way to show them that, is the way to showcase how much they really mean to you and how much you value your relationship with them. And how do you do that in that sort of answer to your question? We leverage technology. com blog, where I am a senior research associate, we’ve conducted research on the utilization of financial planning technology and also what makes up a comprehensive financial plan. And we know two important things that relate to this discussion today. First, that financial planning technology, when we measured it, it didn’t really make anybody faster.

Instead, we believed or what we see is that it made them better in the sense that the technology didn’t really allow them to do things any quicker. Even though they were doing it quicker, they would reuse that time. So they weren’t breezing through a financial plan because it was efficient. They were taking that extra save time to go deeper or run another analysis or understand the plan from a different perspective. So they were building deeper, better plans. And so you might think, what does that then matter to a comprehensive plan? Are we covering more topics? And in a certain way, we are. But in other ways, we’re not.

In particular, we noticed that retirement or that the planning is really happening on a retirement planning and portfolios that kind of reign supreme. And that makes sense. We were just talking about the AUM model and just the way that it’s structured. The other place, we saw that the accumulation planning, so retirement strategies, distribution strategies, this was outpacing accumulation planning. So whether that’s saving for college or doing some budgeting, maybe doing the catch up contributions, that was not at the same level covering those areas wasn’t being covered as often. And so from that, you could say, you know, we’re still not serving clients across their lifetime.

Maybe that’s related to when the client comes in, but certainly there’s something going on here. And so I don’t say this to be a Debbie Downer. I love financial planners and the work that they do. But much like Philip, I see this as a huge opportunity. And now there are newer technologies in our marketplace, specifically related to the FinTech map that we have at Kitsys. There’s a section called advice engagement. And this is like asset map, Bento, Engine. And what they’re doing is they’re operationalizing a minimum standard of care across a lifetime. And so it’s broader than the investments and decumulation. And they’re doing it that the technology side of it is allowing then more advisors to or all advisors to really apply and monitor these touches across the lifetime, you know, broadly across their firm and across their entire book of business.

And so I think, you know, it’s always been hard. I’ve always looked at some of the client segmentation in some ways is almost like a triage. And maybe we don’t have to do that anymore. That may not be necessary in just the way that we can utilize technology. And I think that that’s wonderful news. Good. We’re creating breaks here. Yeah, I love that. And it almost feels like because we have technology that has made parts of what we do faster, especially the data gathering piece, right, that is you point out now we can go deeper with more clients by more value, more advice, which leads to better outcomes like for for people’s lives.

Yeah, I mean, not to get all wishy washy, but that’s kind of important, right? I mean, like, you know, we’re using our money to do really good things. I have told my students that more than one university, you know, if cancer doesn’t get you, longevity will. And the person you’re going to want to know is a financial planner. So, you know, it’s incredibly important. Incredibly important. That’s great. Yeah, we have the wheels spinning. All right. So Adam and I love controversy. So we love debate. You love controversy. I love debate. I like stirring the pot a little bit. Come on. It makes it interesting, right?

I suspect that Philip with the grin that he’s got right now is right. This is right up his alley. So, Philip, Meg, like, is there anything that you think that that our listeners need to hear? We do welcome controversy here. So you can say things that are a little bit on the fringe if you like. But like, what should people be thinking about? What should what do you want to say? What’s on your mind? Eric, great question. Let me throw not just one, but four nudges into your pot to stew about, you know, all of us to reflect and contemplate. Number one, a provocative question for you and our audience.

And that is, can you call yourself a fiduciary and not proactively advise your clients and their members on upcoming age milestones that matter? You all be the judge. Number two, building on what Meg just shared, as our industry tries to evolve into a profession, we would like to raise the notion of a minimum standard of care. Is it perhaps time that we all agree on what holistic or comprehensive actually mean and entail? Can we all agree on a basic set of advice elements that we render at a minimum? That would go a long way in terms of becoming more transparent, more accountable, and building trust with those who matter most, our clients.

Number three, whenever you can quantify the value of your advice. When you advise on making catch-up contributions or utilizing QCDs or leveraging triple tax advantage HSAs, those are great opportunities to quantify and communicate in specific dollar terms, the value that you create for your clients. You will literally earn your keep that way. And last not least, nudge number four, connecting with the next gen. We all know the sobering statistics around how many G2s switch advisors when G1 passes, and we all bemoan those facts. Yet, as we’ve heard from Meg, only 6% of clients say that we connected with them when their kids turned 14 around working papers.

So many advisors seem to be missing out on golden opportunities to connect early and constructively with the next gen. Let’s engage the next gen at key age milestones that matter to them, for example, age 14, or explaining estate planning basics and the importance of a healthcare directive when they reach the age of majority. Leading with advice can and should apply to the whole client family. Well, I don’t think you can get much more specific than those great four bullet points. Drop the mic. Drop the mic. Yep. I have to say, I love all of them, but that first one definitely, I mean, Adam, you and I have debated this before.

I like that one, and we’ll have to get some more thought into that when we hash this out. That was great. And I’m just paying attention to time because we’re but then we all have probably half our means. This was excellent. So we’re going to cut it there. We’re going to kind of cut that drop the mic thing. Is there anything else? No, no food for thought. As you do your contemplation, when you look at things like the fiduciary oath and well intentioned things, they oftentimes have a mindset of I promise not to, I promise not to, they protect against the downside. Maybe it’s time to define fiduciary, not just in terms of downside protection, but upside realization.

I commit to making you aware of all the tax advantaged vehicles out there at your disposal. Do you know what I mean? Bring upside orientation into the definition of fiduciary as opposed to just protecting against the bad stuff. Now that was a lot of really interesting stuff, Derek, don’t you think? I loved it. Yeah. Tons of thought provoking points brought up. So give it to me. What, what really was standing out for you from that whole interview? Because now we’ve got to, there’s so much that I know that advisors are thinking, gosh, I was so deep. We, we actually have already thought this out for you.

So yeah, we’ve got some great takeaways. Go for it. I’m going to preface mine by saying this. Like one of the things I started to realize during this interview in particular is that as advisors, we are responsible for a ton for our clients’ lives. Think about all of the different milestones and transitions and things we help our clients do. Like we’re like, I’ve had clients cry, you know, cry, you know, you know, like, I mean, all of these different things that come to us. So as a side, if you’re ever wondering your value as advice, and if you’re worth the fees, you’re charging darn it all.

You are, if you’re doing a good job, because we do so much for our clients. And I also realize that like, it seems overwhelming, like, man, you’re telling me I got to do this. I got to do that. Like, like, you know, I’ve only been in business two years. I can barely spell insurance. So what am I, how am I supposed to do all this? The good thing is, is you’ll get there and there’s a ton of tech out there to help automate a lot of this stuff. So don’t let it get overwhelmed. You know, fellow advisors, I know this can be tough, but there’s a lot of support out there.

There’s a lot of tech to help you do this. Okay. Now I’ll give you my takeaways. Okay. After another tangent, or no, I’ll just, I’ll just keep going. One more tangent. One more tangent. So I think one of the big ones for me, if I really distill down what they’re telling us here is that the timing, the timing of advice is just as important as leading with that same advice. Okay. We have to make sure we are helping our clients with different age-related milestones that happened in their lives proactively, be proactive. Second, show clients you care before you show how smart you are. But once you do, and then you have to give them this amazing experience where they really see the value of your advice and so forth.

And well, how do you show them you care? Just be you, show that you understand them. Do that through your marketing efforts. All the stuff we’ve talked about with digital marketing, like that’s your opportunity to show you care and then show them how awesome you are with tech that you’re using and how much so smart you are. And then just to wrap all that up, use tech, use amazing processes to do all the other things I just told you to do. Right. It’s all there. It exists. So those are my big takeaways. There’s a ton more there. Like we have to definitely link to the notes and this one for folks.

There’s a ton of resources here. Yeah, that’s really true. I, you know, I love the comments that they were making around, you know, how do you call yourself a fiduciary and not be proactive? I thought that was really interesting that they said that because, you know, we really haven’t seen a true fiduciary standard of care and I’ve got some thoughts about it. And I thought, you know, Phil’s last four bullets really made a lot of sense, right? Minimum standard of care, quantify the value advice whenever you can connect with next generation so that you’re showing that you’ve got longevity, you’re thinking ahead. And I think that’s one of the bigger challenges for financial advisors.

Customers are asking us to think ahead for them. Think about the questions they haven’t thought to ask. You’re supposed to know what questions to ask. And I think that’s really the whole point. I did like what Meg was talking about with advice engagement. Of course, AssetMap is kind of rooted in this whole idea of how do we deliver advice at scale regardless of complexity. And I’m really excited to see that Kits has finally came together and put a category around this kind of obscure amoeba that many of us use to try to engage with our clients around what really matters to them as opposed to just always running an analysis.

Real quick on that, total tangent, but like props to you guys in AssetMap because you guys actually helped define a new category. That’s really hard to do, but you guys freaking did it. And that’s awesome. So I’m just, you know, props, you know, virtual high five, my brother. Virtual high five. Yeah, that was our high five. Thank you, man. I appreciate it. We didn’t know what we were creating when we did it. We were just saying there’s a problem here and I just don’t know where everything is. Let’s put it all on one page so that we actually give them contextual advice. You know, my takeaways for the whole event was a reminder to all of you financial professionals that remember your clients are hiring you because they don’t have the confidence to make those decisions on their own, right?

They could DIY, do it themselves. But the reality is that they’re looking for you to be an advocate for them. And I think of it very much like a child and a parent relationship, right? We got to act like we’re the parent. Okay, here’s, I put out your socks, put out your sweater. It’s going to be cold later. I know what’s coming. So I’m thoughtful to that. And the same thing is true with these major events. Like they mentioned the working papers. I mean, that might be a throwback to the European. That’s what my grandfather used that. Did you get your working papers at 14?

I’m like, no, grandpa, I don’t need working papers in the United States, but that’s fine. But what he’s really talking about is obviously children having the ability to actually earn income and then change the tax rate by not being the parents a tax returns and being thoughtful around, you know, funding in a Roth IRA early on in life. Think about how powerful that is once you have earned income. So there’s some really important aspects that are, we’ll call them proactive in sense that there’s 10, 20, 30 year longevity behind these decisions. We just got to be smart enough to recognize that you got to fund them early, as opposed to waiting till the time where all of a sudden, oh no, the kids are going to college.

We need to fund a 529. That’s not the time to Okay. So the key is we should be bringing these up as soon as possible. Number two, I thought about this and I want to, I want to kind of tell you, I think we should be telling our clients, this is our plan of action for the next two, three, four years. In other words, when we hit these milestones, I’m going to reach out before the milestone is hit. Okay. And I think because he mentioned it before, something like 6% of advisors are talking to their existing clients. That makes no sense, but I know it’s true because we’ve taken over so much business from clients who complain they haven’t heard from their advisor in years.

They know they’re collecting fees. They don’t know what they’re paying for. And you just don’t want to be in this situation. So tell your prospects to people who are prospective clients, how you’re actually going to handle these problems. It’ll give them a good feel for your attitude proactively. And the last comment I want to leave you is the following. If you believe there should be a fiduciary standard of care and it hasn’t been created yet, it’s time for you to write your own. Jerry Maguire was a great movie. It kind of talked to us about how, no, it wasn’t a great movie. Derek doesn’t like it.

Okay, fine. Maybe it wasn’t a great movie, but what I remembered from the movie was why was it a bad movie? That’s another podcast. That’s another podcast. Is that a tangent? Wait, he’s giving everybody, he’s giving me a big thumbs down on the movie. This is like Cisco and Ebert. I’m like, this is a great movie. You’re like, no, well, here’s what matters about that silly comment. The Jerry Maguire paper was that he stayed up all night and he basically wrote this. This is how clients should be treated. And I think that has a lot of merit here. Nothing stops you as a financial professional, if you run your firm or influential in your firm of saying, this is the standard of care we’re going to provide our clients.

Here’s what you can expect from us and publish it. Don’t hide behind it. Publish it, put it out front and say, this is what our standard is. And we actually do this. Other advisors don’t do it. It’s what differentiates us. It’s a great opportunity for you to create your own Jerry Maguire. I’m going to say it again, Jerry Maguire, a client standard of care. So that’s my takeaway. It seems like it’s got controversy behind it. There’s your controversy, Derek. There it is. There it is. I love it. No, thanks, man. That’s all great stuff. And for those of you who are wondering, like, I don’t know how much we actually even said it, but Bento Engine, the software, it solves this problem for you guys, advisors.

If you don’t know, go check them out. Absolutely. There’s your plug. So one of the things that we’ve been hearing a lot, Adam, we’re going to transition out here, folks, a little bit or a lot is advisors really want to hear about mistakes that more seasoned advisors have made or stories that they have. I even ran a poll on LinkedIn on this, hundreds of votes. And those are the two main things. Tell me mistakes you made and what you learned and tell stories from the early days of an advisor and what you learned. So we’re going to share a couple more so you guys can get to know who the heck we are here.

Adam, I’d love to hear what you want to share today. Well, you know, it’s funny. Sometimes we don’t like talking about our failure moments, right? We’ve been blessed with a bunch of successes. And of course, you don’t get here because they were all perfect. But I think in relationship to what mentioned about having a standard of care in the early days of my career, I had a client who had a very specific challenge. She had a high cost basis. Actually, it was, if I think about it, they were government bonds. Okay. I didn’t really very low cost business, excuse me. So high, high appreciation inside these bonds.

And I was working with this mutual fund wholesaler at the time. And he convinced me that my strategy for this would have been to liquidate them completely and put them into this donor advice fund. And then it was going to work out and he was going to get a commensurate tax deduction. And he was just so technically smart and seasoned and in his fifties. And I honestly, I just, I think I just believed him and I wanted to believe him because I liked him. And I made a recommendation to the client and the whole thing wound up working out, not the way the wholesaler told me.

And the client got a hundred thousand dollar tax bill that was not offset. And long story short, I actually did keep the client, which was amazing. But, but it was not a fun conversation and it was really, really an eye opener. What was, what was the takeaway? Clients aren’t looking for shortcuts on their advice. They’re looking to us for good advice. Just because you have an outlet, you need to confirm this. You need to, you need to basically make sure that you’re getting credible resources. Okay. If they need shortcuts, they’ll go to Google. They can Google. They can get a hundred million answers as to how to not do something.

But, but the point is that for financial advisors, we’ve got to make sure that we measure twice, cut once. And I think that that’s the real, that was the takeaway for me. It was like, Oh my gosh, I got to really worry about who I trust. Even though this is a relationship business on our end, the buck stops with us. The relationship is looking to us to be advocates. So we’ve got to be not only proactive, but we got to actually be able to get to the right answers. So that was a mistake that I really learned from. How about you, Derek? Great example. I can just imagine getting that phone call from that client.

That was not a fun day. Oh my gosh. Well, thank you for sharing that. So I have a story about early on and I’m sure what I learned from it, but so for many years I had my life insurance license. So I sold a lot of life insurance and you know, we do that. So when people pass away, we’re there, right? You know, there’s families protected and whatnot. Well, unfortunately I’ve had, I think it’s either four or five clients actually commit suicide in my 16 years now in business. And I’ll tell you, it’s a terrible experience doing a death claim situation just from natural causes or an accident, but a suicide is a whole nother level.

And so what happened in this situation is I remember sitting with these clients, married couple with kids in their home at night and we ended up, we were going to replace a policy that they had at another institution. It had been sold by someone years ago, never serviced. It was the wrong policy, not enough insurance. And as part of, you know, when you’re doing a 1035 and a replacement, you have to acknowledge that everyone has to sign off on it, make sure it’s the right thing for the client, underwriters, everyone looks at it, right? So we did that, but I didn’t have the forms. So instead of shortcutting it, I actually had the client turn on their computer.

Cause this is like way early in my career. I wasn’t bringing a laptop around. I didn’t have a mobile hotspot and we got online and I printed off the specific forms that we needed to document all this and do it correctly. And we did eight, uh, 20 months later, client, client committed suicide, right? So within the two year clause, so I wasn’t even able to deliver anything but the premiums. And so the spouse, I’ll never forget sitting there at that table, having to have that conversation was the worst meeting of my life. Um, she ended up just walking away and I ended up leaving. Well, she tried to sue the insurance company and me and the insurance company.

So Derek, we need to see your files, show us that you document everything correctly, show us that you didn’t take any shortcuts and we’ve got your back. Long story short, they dug through everything. They saw exactly what I did and how I did it correctly. And I didn’t take shortcuts and everything was fine. The company had my back. There were no issues. And I mean, terrible experience for the family, right? Like absolutely awful. Uh, but the point here is like, don’t take shortcuts. Please, please don’t do it. Don’t, don’t like fake forms. Don’t any of this junk out there. It’s not worth it. Um, I know it’s kind of a Debbie Downer thing to share, but this is a reality of a lot of us that are in this industry.

This does happen. Um, so just learn from that and please do what’s in your client’s best interests and even if it requires more paperwork, having to drive out to get a signature, whatever it is, do it. So there you go. That’s, that’s a little bit of not a fun story, man. That was terrible. Like that was an absolutely awful experience. That wasn’t awful. I don’t know why you didn’t let me go last. Like that was brutal. If anybody’s still on this podcast, I know they’re like, Oh, I don’t think in how many times did I, well, hopefully you didn’t short. But the good news is like, I did what I was supposed to do, right?

And like I was doing the right thing for my clients and myself and everything. And it turned out great. Um, other than, you know, the family’s not in a good place, but that’s a whole nother conversation, right? So anyways, just be prepared, do what’s right for yourself and keep listening to our episodes. That’s right. And make sure that you also tell people that there’s a two year contest ability for most life. Oh yeah. We did have a situation, believe it or not, we only had one scenario like that. I only tell you because you brought it up for me. Now I’m thinking about it. We did have a couple, a 90 year old couple that decided that their quality of life was not good anymore.

And they took the road trip in the car and never opened the garage door. If you know what I mean. Oh no. And they, and their policies paid out a claim because they were seasoned. So, you know, it just goes to show that, you know, there are scenarios like this where people make their own life planning, if you will. Um, and of course all the paperwork was in order. So yeah, right. Especially in that space, there’s no room for error. Uh, but I think it’s a great, it’s a great Testament to also, uh, making sure we’re doing the right things for people. Always, always. Well, let’s let, let’s end this on like a lighter note.

How are we going to do that? You want to talk about Jerry McGuire again? Jerry McGuire and how it’s a terrible movie. Um, not sure why it’s a terrible movie though. Oh, you complete me. I mean, come on. Like, does it ever get any more cheese ball? No, that’s total cheese ball. Your clients, you complete me. What kind of proactive advisor are you? If you are thinking of working with Adam right now, maybe reconsider. If he pulls the Jerry McGuire line on you. Wait, you had me at hello. Come on. You can make me show me the money. Come on. Show me the money. You’re telling me a movie with at least three memorable quotes.

Okay. That’s fine. All right. Well, hopefully you guys thought that was funny. Please do us a favor. Make sure not only do you share this podcast with your friends, subscribe to the podcast, but forward it and ask your clients and your friends whether they think that’s, that’s true. Was Jerry McGuire a good movie? I want to know, I want to pull on this one now. Get a poll on it for sure. Oh man, that’s great. Well, it was great spending time with you. And thank you of course, to our friends at Bento and Philip and Meg. They did a great job on the fly and did a great interview.

So thanks for your time and attention there. Derek is always my friend. I will see you at the next time. Sounds good, brother. We’ll take care. See you.