When to Engage a Financial Advisor - Now?

Hey welcome everyone my name is Phil I'm a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ with Foundation Wealth Planning and today I want to talk about the Power of Now and why now might be the time you should reach out to a financial advisor. I know you are probably putting it off but we're going to talk a little about why it might make sense to do it now. So if you like the video you know certainly like it, follow me on the various social media sites and would love to help you if I can.

So anyway you know there's always an important thing

that's always on our mind? Right? There's always something out there that we know

we should do but we don't do it. A common example would be we know we

should get in better shape, our future selves are going to thank us but we don't. Or we say you know that's a good idea let's start that next

week and we're constantly kicking the can down the road. That is a common thing.

Another thing is, you want to you say hey, “life's been busy been working a lot I want to  slow down be able to spend a little more time with my kids.” But that's going to happen next year or 6 months from now or in in 5 years I'm going to slow down and you know just life happens that time comes and goes and you know before you know your kids are out of the house and maybe you didn't slow down as much as you hoped you would.

There's a lot of examples like that and a lot of those come also in the financial world and so there's an intense power of doing things now. If we know we need to get something done, we need to make a phone call, we need to connect with someone we need to do a project we need to do whatever; it is doing that now.

You know and I see a common thing within our industry would be getting life insurance getting your estate documents done because we know that bad things do happen and eventually, we're all going to die, right? And so your family needs to be protected and if you don't have life insurance that might force your spouse to have to go back to work before they're ready.

If you don't have your estate documents then the state is going to decide what happens with your kids. What happens with your assets? These are really important things that we need to have a plan for and I think that leads me into why it makes sense to find

an advisor. These are topics that we are going to talk about from the jump, what do you have in place now and what do we need to have in place that we don't?

So I hear this a lot when I'm talking with people that have thought about getting an advisor. They thought about making a change and they think that my firm might be the right fit for them. They say well you I'm getting ready to buy a house I I'll talk to you after that. I'm getting ready to start a new job I'll talk to you after that. I'll talk to you when I retire. I'm going to retire in a few years I'll reach out then and this is not really the approach that's going to make a lot of sense.

So let me kind of break down each one of those and go through why when you have a big life event coming up, because they all have financial implications, why it's great to have a financial planner in your corner. Or at least have interviewed one or two or three and you know hey maybe I don't or maybe I do but having someone in your corner on these types of decisions can be really beneficial.

So for example, retirement. When you're young there's a lot more levers we can pull to make sure you're set up well for retirement. We can talk about how much you're saving

and should we be saving more? Beyond that, what accounts should we be saving

those in, because that can have a big impact on your current situation and future situation. What account should we be saving in once you put the money in those accounts what should they be invested in? And then the other things that are unquantifiable but just helping people avoid some of the pitfalls of life. Such as buying the wrong Insurance, buying an investment that was a really poor idea, you know doing

a lot of things that we do as humans that that can really have disastrous financial implications.

Having an advisor in your corner can help you navigate some of those pitfalls maybe sidestep them. So we can pull a lot of levers to say hey we're kind of off track for retirement now but we can do X Y and Z and get us back on track and here's the plan to retire. Versus if you are 6 months away from retiring there's not a lot of levers to pull. There's things we can talk about ways we can kind of try to manage your situation but your retirement is going to be much more at risk if you're only just now engaging advisor right at retirement time. So it's really important to be engaged with one well in advance and I would advocate for having a relationship earlier than later but at a minimum having numerous years of a runway to try to get ahead of some of the different complicated situations that may come up. Because you have your whole your whole life to prepare for retirement but you only have one time to retire.

Okay the other thing is we're moving on to, I talked about a house a lot of times people think that's not really something you would talk to your advisor about but it's a huge thing you should talk to your advisor about. If you only get the house that the bank says you can afford and I've done a video on this(click here for the video) the way that they run your debt-to-income ratio is it's going to probably financially strap you pretty significantly to the point where you may not be able to save enough to accomplish your goals, at least in the short term. Maybe your income increases significantly and that alleviates that problem but that doesn't happen for everybody. So you're going to be strapped financially if you get the biggest house that the bank says you can afford your real estate agent shows you an awesome house. I don't have anything against people who do loans and real estate agents they're doing their job, but having a third party that's not you know getting an invested interest in the sale of a home or the purchase of a loan can be really valuable. So what we would do in a good financial planning session is we would talk through and say okay what are our goals, how much do we have to allocate for a down payment, what's a payment? All in cost when you're thinking mortgage, insurance, tax, interest and then just general maintenance? We know that bigger homes older homes and so on and so forth have higher maintenance costs and some other types of homes but all homes have maintenance costs so what's kind of the all-in cost what's going to allow us to be able to maintain the home pay for the home and still allow us to save and reach those goals. We can run all those numbers

and say okay based on all that you can buy a home that's worth x amount and

then you have a budget and you can go shopping for houses that are in that you can find the one that's going to meet your needs and if you don't find one then that means maybe we should you know wait a little bit to buy the house and I think that provides some really good value so instead of waiting to talk to an advisor after you bought the house let's address it beforehand.

Same thing with the job. There's a lot of things within a job offer that you might be getting beyond a salary. Most people can understand a salary say hey that's more than what I'm making now let's do it or maybe you have multiple offers and I think it makes sense to compare the benefits. How much are they paying for insurance? What's their

Employer match? Some jobs might have some sort of employee stock purchase plan or

some sort of stock option plan being able to evaluate those things to get a better read on your total compensation is going to be really important. And that's something that you can work with a good adviser to talk through what is the value of some of these things and how does that play into the job because obviously pay and benefits is only one piece of a job. So we can’t help you with all the other aspects of it but assuming all

things are equal and you'd be happy at both places they both seem a good place to work where where's the total comp going to be better. So you want to have an advisor in your corner for those types of things at least in my opinion.

This notion that we should delay finding advisor maybe because it's painful. I know that there's some people and I have heard it from people that you know it's just it's hard to start in your relationship with an advisor. You think you're going to be judged you think you're going to be berated for certain past decisions you've made and there are sadly some advisers that have done that in the past, but that's not the way the relationship should be built. Everyone has made mistakes including financial advisors. So we've all learned from various mistakes and I think the important thing is, to start the relationship you got to put your cards on the table. That's hard, but be able to say hey here's what I've done here's my assets here's everything but then be able to build a trustworthy relationship that you can feel comfortable with in in a safe environment.

You can share these things that aren't going to be told to your friends and family it's a safe place that you can kind of talk through these different really complex and sensitive topics in some ways but it's so important, it can really help you get on the right path

and then encourage you.

To  circle back to the very beginning to implement the important things like life insurance such as getting your will or trust done and or trust making sure that we've got

those various documents that the kids are going to have guardianship there there's a lot of things that we can not only help provide guidance on but then be a bit of accountability partner. You know personal trainer type that says hey now we know what we do I'm going to encourage you to go and do that because that's what we decided is going to be the best fit for you and your family and so I hope this encourages you

it's not a scary thing.

I would encourage you to talk to multiple advisers find one that's going to align with your value system find one that's going to align with your process and that you know the cost and then you're ultimately going to get value from that. Because you should be getting a lot of good value from a good adviser. So I hope this helps, I think a lot of people would benefit from it there are some people that maybe their situation doesn't

warrant it, a good adviser would probably tell you that. “Hey your situation here's maybe a couple pointers come back in a certain period of time,” but at least then you know you've at least checked in on it.

I would guess that a lot of people who aren't using advisors or aren't getting the service they need from a proper adviser getting the proper advice they need could benefit from one that will. I hope that helps this has been a topic that I've had these conversations a lot delaying. So the power of now if you got a big decision, make that decision and one of those might be find an adviser.

God bless

Phil Francois, CFP®

https://www.foundationwealthplanning.com/