Friday 8 September 2017

Weekend Reading for Financial Planners (Sep 9-10)

Enjoy the current installment of “weekend reading for financial planners” – this week’s edition kicks off with a series of big news stories around broker-dealers, including the announcement that LPL is going to force most new hybrid advisors who join the platform to use LPL’s own corporate RIA (and not outside RIAs, nor even the RIAs of its OSJs), the news that Mass Mutual is cutting its MetLife annuity trail compensation by a whopping 73% for advisors who left the MetLife broker-dealer in recent years (a potentially troubling precedent), and the emerging trend of smaller broker-dealers “tucking in” to larger B/Ds by becoming a branch OSJ in order to avoid the compliance and technology burdens of running a B/D while maintaining their team and culture.

From there, we have a few practice management articles, including one on how trying to make all your clients happy can actually reduce the success of the business (as it hopelessly divides the limited resources of the business), another on why it’s better to try to win new client business by being “different” than just showing how you’re “better” (in large part because few consumers will believe you when you say you’re better anyway!), and a third on how to handle the news when you find out you’re losing a great client (by changing your own mindset to focus on the capacity opportunity it creates!).

We also have several more technical articles this week, from a discussion of how it’s not enough to just talk about “success” and “failure” risk of a retirement plan because there are really several different degrees of “bad” (from not maintaining a desired standard of living, to not being able to support a basic floor standard of living, or true depletion and bankruptcy), to a fascinating study that looks at what investors really want from an advisor’s investment reporting (and how it’s not only a performance reporting issue but also a trust issue), and a look at how our understanding of investor risk profiling is beginning to change with a more nuanced understanding of the different factors at play (which should only get better as we gather more big data on how investors really do behave).

We wrap up with three interesting articles, all focused on the theme of overcoming our own personal hurdles and demons: the first looks at how for successful advisory businesses, one of the greatest “risks” is becoming satisfied that the business is good enough, and never asking pushing it to be great (which leaves substantial upside on the table!); the second is the story of investment writer Morgan Housel, who was a lifelong sufferer of severe stuttering, but went through a personal shift that has allowed him to at least partially overcome his disability, to the point that he is now working actively as a professional speaker on behavioral finance and investment issues; and the last is the story of writer Jeff Goins, who transitioned from being “just” a successful writer to an entrepreneur and business owner, and grew the business to more than a million dollars of revenue… making himself miserable in the process, and ultimately leading him to make a difficult decision to “downsize” the business, which while scary ultimately led him to be substantially happier, and to take home substantially more in profit as well!

Enjoy the “light” reading!

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source https://www.kitces.com/blog/weekend-reading-for-financial-planners-sep-9-10/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=weekend-reading-for-financial-planners-sep-9-10

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