5 Ways Retirement Guidance Brings Value to Your Practice
To compete successfully with today’s robo-advisors and low-cost, bare-bones advisory services, financial advisors have two choices—to reduce income or boost service. The first choice is problematic. A small-medium advisory firm usually doesn’t have the financial resources to compete on price with alternative services and still make a profit. That leaves only one real choice—to add value by boosting your service.
Retirement guidance is an option. It’s a service that helps clients deal with the mental, social, physical and emotional aspects of retirement. You’re already guiding your clients to fund their retirement well. Adding this type of guidance can enable them to live their retirement well, too.
1. Help Your Clients Thrive Through One of the Biggest Transitions of Their Lives
We're taught to believe that retirement should be easy and come naturally to us, but it doesn’t for most people. Unfortunately, few people spend enough time deciding what kind of retirement they want. Even fewer spend time discussing their vision with all the people involved in their lives, like spouses and children. Guidance can help your clients start discussions around questions like, “Will we downsize or stay where we are?” “How will we make new friends outside of work?” “How often do we want to visit family?” “How much traveling do we want to do?” “How much time do we expect to spend together vs. in separate activities?”
You can help prevent your clients from wasting years of their retirement in a life that isn’t as full and satisfying as they’d like.
2. Open a Conversation About Health and Long-Term Care
Physical issues that occur as we get older form a necessary part of any retirement guidance conversation. People don’t like to think about what their lives will be like if health issues limit their abilities, or they get seriously ill, but advance planning around these issues can make a significant impact on the quality of life. It can lead to discussions about health insurance, long-term care insurance, revocable trusts and other financial strategies.
3. Gain a Deep Understanding of New Clients’ Hopes and Dreams
Retirement lifestyle conversations with new clients can reveal the dreams that are dear to their hearts—and help you structure financial strategies to get them closer to those dreams. These discussions can set the stage for a long, productive client/advisor relationship.
4. Develop Closer Relationships With Clients You’ve Known For Years
Long-term client/advisor relationships can stagnate. Even with good clients, over time you can stop exploring new opportunities together. By encouraging non-financial conversations about retirement, advisors can develop deeper relationships with clients they've known for years and renew their understanding of who these clients have become and are becoming.
5. Differentiate Yourself as Someone Who Cares About More Than Your Clients’ Financial Position
This is a powerful differentiator. It’s the true difference between a service provider and a trusted advisor. Everyone wants to work with people who truly care. Technology has made a very high level of service available to us in many areas of our lives. We can order nearly anything online and get it tomorrow. We can tell a virtual assistant to play our favorite song, call for an Uber or give us an insurance quote. What you, as an advisor, can provide that technology can’t are the human qualities of compassion, empathy, and encouragement.
United Capital focuses on making sure you have the knowledge, time and resources to provide those uniquely human qualities to your clients. We want you to be able to engage with your clients for a lifetime and help them live richly.
For Financial Professional Use only. This document and any attached materials are the sole property of United Capital Financial Advisers, LLC (United Capital) and are not to be used by you other than to evaluate United Capital’s service and/or products. United Capital Financial Advisers, LLC (“United Capital”), is an affiliate of Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC and subsidiaries of the Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., a worldwide, full-service investment banking, broker-dealer, asset management and financial services organization. This document and any attached materials are not to be disseminated, distributed, or otherwise conveyed throughout your organization to employees without a need for this information or to any third parties without the express written permission of United Capital.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
United Capital Financial Advisers, LLC (“United Capital”), is an affiliate of Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC and subsidiaries of the Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., a worldwide, full-service investment banking, broker-dealer, asset management and financial services organization. Investing involves risk and clients should carefully consider their own investment objectives and never rely on any single chart, graph or marketing piece to make decisions.
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