Pausing Saves $ and Lives

We are impatient. The recent pauses in the J&J vaccine (I took the shot on 4/6) confirm the need for experienced  third party checks and balances.  We will discuss how our impatience also impacts our wealth advisory business. Good things come to those who wait. This week we will discuss our need to wait before making important investment decisions and understand the math behind our financial planning recommendations. I understand that we are all impatient, but hopefully this blog can help you pause before you cross the investment street. 

 

We learned many lessons from Bernie. They should start with a needed upgrade of our investment committee rules. Bernie proved that our due diligence team needed to ask better questions. We also need to wait for confirming answers that aren’t found at our golf club or from our religious peer groups. My experienced options friend confirmed that he had never heard of Bernie’s split dollar option strategy. This answer created questions that needed to be confirmed by our investment committee if it was willing to wait. Most of our committee members were thrilled with the “opportunity” to invest with Madoff. Waiting allowed them to confirm their vote with other experts. Our final vote was to decline. Waiting helped our clients save $. They become our clients for life❤️

There are numerous items we need to consider when making investment decisions for our clients. Unfortunately, our initial decisions can be too emotional and we need to step back and wait before we place our investment  bets. Investing is a game of chance that can be improved by research and time. Taking the time to walk away from the computer could be the most important decision you make as an advisor. 

Waiting 

Advisors and clients want to know what to do now. The answers shouldn’t be how our quarterly performance was versus the index.  Most performance reporting solutions support  this erroneous belief. We need to wait and insure our performance reports and our website support our strong belief to wait. My experience is that using Google Analytics to report how many times our clients check their account balances is a strong contra indicator. All of us need to wait and potentially limit the number of website visits we allow. Taking this approach could increase client satisfaction and performance. Behavioral  Finance supports the power of anchors. 

Our quarterly meetings and financial plans could create more problems than valid answers. Waiting and only meeting when the client wants to see you you will help. Looking both ways before you cross the street will help too!