Financial Advice only for the wealthy?

The financial advice industry has chased the high net worth client like the paparazzi have chased film stars.

Emerging advice professionals should be wary of adopting the same mindsets and arguments that advice will only be sought by people with lots of money.

Great advice has more to do with the complexities created by money (or the lack of money) rather than money itself.

 

Great advice is always worth it.

Great advice should be judged on its merits rather than the strings attached to it.  

The anti-FOFA (Future of Financial Advice) argument floating around at the moment that in the proposed post-FOFA world only the wealthy will be able to afford advice, is like predicting back in the old days of green screen 256Kb personal computers that only the wealthy will be able to afford a computer.

How wrong was that? Now we all have far more powerful computers in the phones that we carry.

The financial product love-affair clouding the judgment of today’s product and platform-based advisers has its origins in long-held habits of a fixed focus on the client’s money rather than the client.

Great advice is about solving problems for our clients that they can’t easily or properly solve themselves.

Great advice overcomes the question of affordability.

When positioned as the investment that it is, great advice will be affordable, even if the client has to go further into debt to afford the advice. In the proper context, advice that pushes our clients further into debt, just to pay the advice, is often the best financial investment they make to properly attend and manage the financial complexities that client’s face.

Too many in the industry today just don’t know how to price or position their advice when fees for the advice might actually increase the client’s short-term debt. That’s an indictment on our industry, not on the quality of the advice.

 

Advice is not a luxury good or service.

Advice is scalable, not based upon a sliding scale of product, but a sliding scale of complexity.

It’s a furphy that only the wealthy will be able to pay for advice and the anti-FOFA lobby should adopt more intelligent arguments.

Great advice will always be determined by how better it enables our clients to achieve their outcomes whilst overcoming their specific complexities.

What do you think?

Photo Credit: www.sproutdaily.com

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