Giving away the shop gladly!

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I’ve been writing alot about passive investing (which anyone can do) and detailing pretty much how I run my business. One may think I’m giving away all the secrets, giving away the shop.

Why would I want to do something like that? If you show clients how its done then clients won’t need you, right? If you’re taking a passive investment approach then what am I paying you to do? to choose investments that I can pick myself?

There certainly is surface risk here but there’s risk in everything. It also bears noting that anyone can piece most of this stuff together, from various media sources, but I hope what will differentiate this site is the fact that you can find a lot of it in one place, one stop shopping:)

All I can say is that my goal is to continue to present as much information as I can on this blog; to give away everything I know and detail how I run my business, without disclosing client information (of course). I would love it if I did a good enough job here, that people felt like they could begin to help themselves, when it comes to planning their futures’.

Here’s 2 reasons why I’m willing to do this:

1. I think the financial advisory business has always faced a crisis in confidence and until the public knows it all from the advisors side that will never begin to improve. I’ve stated before that the biggest problem in my business is Trust- between clients and advisors. I want that to change; it begins with full disclosure on a broader based scale.
2. By writing about all this I don’t think I’m jeopardizing my livelihood.There are probably a lot of financial advisors that would not be comfortable doing what I’m doing, they would not be comfortable giving away the (so called) ‘keys to the kingdom.’
   • In my opinion, they’d be scared to offer clients a passive investment model. Because an active investment approach gives them the necessary angle they need to sell their ‘expertise’ to their clients. Without that bird in the hand they’d be left with little to differentiate themselves with.

Degrees of separation

Running a planning based business, (either fee-based or fee-only) creates degrees of separation. In my opinion, if you’re not running a financial planning based business, then you are that much more expendable. You run the risk of losing clients, in an age where technology has made information a lot more accessible. It’s that much harder to differentiate yourself from what the clients can do for themselves.

If you’re a commission based advisor it’s much harder to create that separation and you’re forced to take more of a smoke and mirrors approach. You have to play it a lot closer to the vest when it comes to disclosing how you run your business and how you’re compensated.

This segment of the business is forced to rely much more on intangibles in order to retain clients, things like: investment picking prowess, geographic convenience, warm smiles and nepotism to name a few.

An open book

I doubt my job will ever go by the waste side. Realistically, if I was scared about that, I probably wouldn’t write so openly about all this. I’m no different then everyone else, in that, I need to earn a decent living. I believe people will always need good people to help them along the way.

I also believe what makes my job safe is the fact that the financial planning process is not static. Things are always changing in our lives and clients will always need good advice when it comes to interpreting the forever evolving landscape.

I’ll end with this random thought: If people were actually reading my blog I’d be making a few enemies after posts like this one…

Tags: Featured, Financial Planning Retirement and Now!, Passive Investing