WHY Hire a Financial Advisor
A lot of people go back and forth about whether or not they should hire a financial advisor. In this video, I’m going to share with you my thoughts about why hiring a financial advisor can be beneficial to you.
I’ve been in the financial services industry now for over a decade. And it never fails, that I find myself several times a year sitting down with a couple or an individual that has shared with me that they have been wanting to come in and speak with an advisor or talk with a financial planner for a really long time. But, they just could not seem to find the time to do it. And I get it, because I am a father, husband, I volunteer, our business owner, life can just be super, super busy.
We all can tell ourselves 100,000 reasons why we’ll do it tomorrow. Well, one of the things about financial planning, and specifically with just money in general, I tell people, time can be your enemy, or it can be your friend. Most of the conversations that I’ve heard over the years, when it comes to personal finance, when it comes to money revolve around the investment side of the equation, we’re constantly trying to figure out how we can maybe eke out a better return or a higher rate of return.
We’re looking at stock charts. And you know, a lot of people (especially online) will go back and talk to you about the power of compounding. And they’ll show you a chart from the S&P 500 or the NASDAQ. You know, if you look back 100 million years back to the beginning of time, and we started collecting data. And if you had $10,000, or just $1,000, to invest, and you would have done that man, you’d be a squillionaire by now.
That’s great, you know, and in anything that can give the proper time horizons when it comes to investing and show people the power of compounding. I’m all for that. However, one of the biggest things that I think people miss, when it comes to working with a financial advisor is the power of having another person that knows who you are, knows your goals, and can give you their thinking power that can give you guidance that can ask you powerful questions that maybe you didn’t did not even know, you needed to ask yourself.
And so the idea of the advisor as a coach, I think is huge. And a lot of you’re like, well, I don’t need I don’t need a coach, why would you? Why would you tell me I want to have a coach, I don’t want a coach, I want to I want to have an advisor who’s going to show me how to achieve my financial goals?
Well, what I would tell you is I’m a huge sports fan. And every major athlete I’ve ever seen, has coaches. Not only do they have like high level head coaches, but they will also have position coaches. in the NFL, shooting coaches in the NBA, and golf swing coaches in the PGA. So, no matter where you go, the high-end high-level achievers always are looking for coaches to give themselves a better edge.
Number two when it comes to financial advisors and planning is helping you identify just where you are. I’ll tell you a quick story. I was at the mall the other day. This is a mall that I’ve been to dozens and dozens and dozens of times in my life. And so, I don’t think much about it.
I get in my car, I drive to the mall I walk in, I know what store I need to go to. I’m headed to that place specifically. I went into an entrance that I don’t normally use. And I walk in, and I was about halfway to where I needed to go. And a gentleman stopped me and said, hey, do you know where the food court is?
And I immediately said to him (confidently), I said, Oh yeah, I turned and I pointed in the direction that I was sure the food court was in. And I said it’s just right down there. All you have to do is walk down there, take a right and you’ll be there at the food court. The problem is he told me thank you and walked on.
The problem was when I took a moment in oriented myself and looked around, I realized I had given him horrible instructions. They were completely wrong. The reason why is I had not oriented myself to where I was. I didn’t know my point A.
So, when it comes to building out a financial map for yourself, for your future for the goals that you want to achieve, a lot of people don’t understand their point A (like where you are now), one of the biggest questions people have is:
Am I doing okay? Am I where I need to be? Am I behind? What have I done wrong? What am I doing wrong? These are all questions that can help you establish your point A when it comes to financial planning.
And so while we might have an idea about where we want to go, I think it’s also important to have a really good idea about where you are right now. And having somebody who can be objective with expertise. And listening, that could be a huge, huge advantage for someone who’s wanting to plan for their financial future.
Lastly, course corrections. Right. I don’t fly very often. Yet, I would know that it’s extraordinarily rare to get into an airplane and go anywhere where you stay completely on the heading that you use when you take off. You almost always have to have course corrections.
How many people have been on a flight and heard the pilot come up and say, You know what, folks, we’ve got a storm coming, so we’re going to fly a little bit around it just to try to avoid some unnecessary turbulence. Right?
We know what that’s like, or holiday travel, you get out, you know, you get on the road. And instead of taking the main interstate route, you know, traffic is going to be bad, there’s going to be traffic jams. Instead of like staying on the highway, you take the back roads, you turn on the GPS and you say, avoid the highways.
Well, financial planning could be a lot like that, because life is messy. Things happen. We go through life transitions, like our you know, we grow up, we get married, we get divorced, we have kids, we bring a pet or two in the household, we decided we want to change jobs and go after something else completely. We, you know, decide we want to start a business and how do we form that business, maybe we’re lucky in that business as well as sell that business.
Life is full of transitions and inflection points where having additional brainpower on your team can be a huge, huge advantage. And the reason I say that is because I use the word team, because if you’re constantly going to find somebody, when life is happening, instead of having an established relationship, then you’re constantly in reactionary mode, that’s not being proactive, you’re being reactive.
And there’s a huge difference because somebody who knows you has walked with you has developed a relationship with you, who knows how you understand things, who knows how you value certain things, they are going to have a tremendous advantage when it comes to communicating with you about money in terms that you understand and in ways that you value versus someone who is meeting you for the first time and trying to solve a puzzle for you.
So, keep that in mind. I think that there’s so many positions of value that a financial advisor can bring. And I think too often we focus on just the portfolio management when it’s more about wealth management, financial life management in the long run. So those are my thoughts for today. Hope you enjoyed it.