A consumer with a sound financial education will be able to create their own financial plan, and will therefore become responsible for it. For those seeking help with financial stress, the solution is to get a financial education, and to create their own financial security. For the financial professional, in reality, Financial Planning 2.0 becomes a satisfying alternative to do what’s best for a client in less time with substantially less potential liability and earn a handsome income in the process Lukas Lindler.
If you make your living providing financial planning services for people, it is possible that your professional—and well-intentioned—advice cost your clients hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars last year. With many investment strategies down anywhere from 30% to 60% as the global economic crisis unfolds, financial professionals everywhere are questioning the validity of their approach.
Of course, one might argue that these people weren’t to blame for the economic morass that we’re in, but your clients may not see it that way. They, in good faith, entrusted professional advisors with their hard-earned dollars, with the expectation that they would receive help and advice to preserve their wealth, and build more. When the opposite happened, who else could they blame?
The reality of course is that just about everybody got caught flat-footed when it came to the true severity of the current financial problem. As this meltdown has shown, it’s highly questionable if the traditional diversified approach for wealth building strategies and wealth preservation—all based on financial instruments tied to the global economy—will work in the future. Also, it’s interesting that despite the efforts of the financial planning community, less than 3% of the population has a written financial plan. Clearly it is time for financial professionals to rethink how they provide advice and services to their clients. And it’s time for those clients to rethink what services and advice they really need and how they will obtain them.
The better approach should be for financial planners to help people help themselves. The solution is Financial Planning 2.0, a financial education vehicle that has no product bias or agenda vis a vis the typical conflict of interest and that is not designed to steer a prospect to products or services that make the advisor the most money. Financial Planning 2.0 provides people with the financial education that will teach them how to arrive at objective strategies to help overcome financial obstacles and reach their future financial goals by themselves.
A financial planner who really wants to make a difference—while making substantially more money in less time—could show clients and prospects how to obtain this kind of unbiased financial advice using Financial Planning 2.0. Their clients should understand how to implement objective recommendations while avoiding middlemen in the process. At the same time, consumers should be able to gain this knowledge independently of their advisors.
A consumer with a sound financial education will be able to create their own financial plan, and will therefore become responsible for it. For those seeking help with financial stress, the solution is to get a financial education, and to create their own financial security. For the financial professional, in reality, Financial Planning 2.0 becomes a satisfying alternative to do what’s best for a client in less time with substantially less potential liability and earn a handsome income in the process.