How I Finally Found My Dream Job As A Financial Planner

October 06, 2017

For the past decade plus, I have been helping people with their finances. It’s what I love to do. But getting to my dream job was a different journey than what I thought it would be. I started in the financial planning business to help people and scratch an entrepreneurial itch I’d had for some time.

The challenge of getting started as a financial advisor

At my first firm, I quickly learned that being an advisor meant selling life insurance and annuities. Success was measured by how many prospects I could get in front of and how much commission revenue I could generate through product sells. This wasn’t exactly what I wanted to be doing — I knew I was helping my clients, but also knew I needed to expand my training to be able to provide help in all aspects of their financial lives.

So I completed the gauntlet that is CFP® certification, and landed at a large wealth planning firm in a consulting role working with affluent clients. I was delivering financial planning for my clients and helping them manage their assets – my dream job (or so I thought).

Something’s missing

I was loving my work with clients and I was a good financial planner. I especially enjoyed building relationships and managing investment portfolios. I was making a nice living, working with a team of incredibly smart and honest professionals, and delivering on comprehensive wealth management for my clients. But it always felt like something was missing.

Measuring my impact

I started asking myself how much of an impact I was really having for my clients who were already in great financial shape before I ever met them? I was left unfulfilled by helping wealthy clients become marginally wealthier. To be honest, I knew they would be fine regardless if their portfolios had a good quarter or not. What about the people who don’t have a lot of assets for an advisor to manage? Who is helping them?

Following the money

In order for most advisors or financial planners to make a living, they have to sell a product or service. That means they have to find clients that:

Need/want that product or service; and
Can afford to pay for said product or service.

There is nothing wrong with an advisor expecting to be compensated — most are honest and hardworking and should expect to be paid for their services. But there is a disconnect. Those people struggling with debt or cash flow problems would benefit tremendously from working with a financial professional, but the compensation structure in the financial services industry essentially denies them access to the help they need.

Where financial wellness benefits come in

Luckily for me, I found Financial Finesse a couple of years ago, a company dedicated to unbiased financial planning guidance delivered by experienced, qualified professionals available to people in any financial situation. I had to bide my time to meet the 10 year experience requirement, but I am so glad I did.

Being with the company that pioneered the idea of employers providing financial wellness to their employees as part of their benefits is amazing. We help employers provide an important benefit to their employers that is shown to improve absenteeism, increase productivity, and save on health care costs as financial stress is reduced. We help employees find actionable solutions to their pressing financial issues through a coaching model with no hidden agendas.

Living my purpose

And I get to live my purpose by helping people make good financial choices and reach their financial goals — now that is my dream job.

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The Financial Services Industry Is Broken – Here’s How We Should Fix It

June 23, 2017

Along with being a financial planner here, each member of our team wears a bunch of different hats. Obviously, one of my other hats is a blogger. Another is being responsible for hiring new financial planners, where I have the opportunity to talk with incredibly talented CFP®’s from all over the country who want to work at Financial Finesse.

The reality of the situation is that even with a minimum of 10 years of industry experience and the CFP® designation, along with being wonderful human beings, only around 2% of those who apply for this role end up making it all the way through our hiring process. It’s astounding to me that I actually made it through the process and am working here.

Don’t tell anyone, but I regularly talk to planners who are smarter, harder working, more entertaining and much more photogenic than I am, and quite often they don’t get hired. There are lots of reasons for that, but that’s not the direction I want to take this post. Maybe another day…

What most financial planners do

The reason I talk about this is that the overwhelming majority of planners I talk to are in the business of giving world class advice to high net worth families when they apply to work at Financial Finesse, which is what I did prior to coming here. They are typically measured by the amount of assets or fees they collect and are tired of having to sell in order to also do financial planning.

For me, when I was working on a high net worth planning team, there was always a piece of me that thought, “The people we are working with are going to be just fine for the rest of their lives, even if they develop a bad case of ‘the stupids,’ while the people who most need our help can’t afford it and don’t have access to it. There is something fundamentally wrong with this system!” I interviewed three planners today who said something very similar. And that thought is what is driving them to look at us as a potential final career stop.

Working with the other 99%

Most of the employees I talk to in my role as a financial planner will never become a client in a high net worth planning office. Most would be happy just paying off their debt and having enough income in retirement to live a modest lifestyle. My guess (because I’m too lazy to do the math!) is that over half of the people I meet with are there to discuss either how to get out of serious debt or how to stop living paycheck to paycheck and maybe prepare for retirement or put their kids through college. These are the people who wouldn’t normally have access to decent financial planning guidance. And this isn’t isolated to the people I talk to – my colleagues say the same.

A recent Fed “Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households” reported that just under 1/4 of households can’t pay their monthly bills and almost half of households wouldn’t be unable to cover, with cash, an emergency expense of $400 or more. This information doesn’t surprise me, but it does get my hackles up a little bit about how messed up our financial services industry is.

These are the people that need help from our best and brightest planners. These are the people that our current system is leaving behind. These are the people that I wanted to help when I made the decision to work here.

A new branch of the industry

The good news is that these are the people that I’m helping today. Financial Finesse was founded on the belief that all Americans, regardless of income or net worth, deserve access to excellent financial planning guidance. That’s the vision that guides us. And we are actually excited to see more competitors in our space. Employers are catching on that providing a workplace financial wellness benefit is good for employees and it’s good for the bottom line – if you don’t have a financial wellness benefit at work yet, chances are you will. And that’s a good thing. I firmly believe that our industry will revolutionize the way traditional financial services are offered in the future.

I only wish that every employer in the country would work with us so that I could help everyone. Since I can’t clone myself, I try to at least hire others who have that same burning passion to help those who need it the most. Our internal motto and rallying cry (what I like to say is our true mission), is that we are “changing f’ing lives.” And that’s what we’re doing – one person, one family at a time.

What’s in it for you

What does this have to do with your own personal financial situation? Well, if nothing else, know that we feel your pain – getting unbiased answers to your questions is truly a challenge in today’s world. But if you do have access to a financial wellness benefit at work, USE IT. It’s there to help you and it’s not just for people who are in crisis. In fact, the best time to use it is when you’re not, so we can help make sure you’re ready when the next crisis hits.

Here at Financial Finesse, we believe strongly in the importance of workplace culture and the power of doing well by doing good. This article is the fifth in our week-long series of posts where we highlight a specific part of our company culture that helps to make Financial Finesse one of America’s best places to work. This is just one part of our celebration of recent recognition by Inc., who listed us as one of the Best Workplaces in 2017 and Entrepreneur, who named us to the Small-Sized Companies: The Best Company Cultures in 2017 list.

The Difference Between a Financial Wellness Benefit & Your 401(k)

June 20, 2017

Before I joined Financial Finesse as a member of the Planner Team, I worked for a large wealth management institution as a 401(k) plan specialist. As a 401(k) plan specialist, my role was to help design and implement 401(k) plans for companies as well as educate their employees about their retirement accounts. One of my bigger frustrations in that role was that I was pigeon-holed into discussions solely about retirement contributions and asset allocation.

Although these topics are important when it comes to retirement planning, as I tried to educate people about how to save for retirement, I quickly found that the real problem people were facing wasn’t that they didn’t know how much to contribute or how to invest. The reason they weren’t making full use of their 401(k) savings accounts stemmed from a lack of emergency savings or a budget.

This often leads to using a credit card or 401(k) loans to get through unexpected events like medical issues or family emergencies, and definitely gets in the way of being able to save for retirement. In order to help people achieve a secure retirement, I realized that they first needed help achieving a secure today.

A lack of solutions

As I looked for a way to help, I found myself stumped. I was trained to help people avoid estate taxes but not how to help someone who was overwhelmed by medical debt. My meetings were supposed to be focused on getting more money into 401(k) plans and helping people choose the best investments, not how to put together a budget or handle debt. The compliance rules in the industry kept me from REALLY being able to help with the other stuff, the stuff that had to be overcome before I could be of any use with my training and work objectives. It broke my heart to be sitting in 401(k) enrollment meetings, talking to people sometimes in tears over a financial crisis, feeling completely unable to help.

Finding a way to help

I knew that I really needed to be helping people navigate these barriers before my work as a 401(k) specialist would have any meaning. I started looking around for solutions, even something that I could offer as part of my meetings so that they could help themselves. That’s when I came across Financial Finesse, a company that provides employees with a workplace financial wellness benefit. I knew instantly I had found a new home. For the first time I could:

Focus on financial wellness vs. just trying to get more money into the accounts I managed.
Help “everyday” people with their daily financial needs vs. strictly helping affluent people become more affluent.
Stop being judged by sales quotas and instead be judged based on whether or not I changed lives for the better.

The difference between your financial wellness benefit & your 401(k)

While employees often come to us with questions about their 401(k) and companies often hire us to satisfy their fiduciary duty as a 401(k) plan sponsor, my colleagues and I spend more of our time helping people deal with the rest of their financial picture – how to choose the right mortgage, how to pay off credit cards, deciding the best way to deal with their student loans, etc. The big difference is that we take a look at your TOTAL picture, not just the balance in your 401(k). And that’s what I love the most about my job – helping people with what they really need.

Your 401(k) is one piece of your financial wellness puzzle. Working with a planner through your workplace financial wellness benefit helps you to see where it fits in among all your other priorities. If you’re fortunate enough to work for an employer that offers you a financial wellness benefit, I encourage you to take advantage today.

Here at Financial Finesse, we believe strongly in the importance of workplace culture and the power of doing well by doing good. This article is the second in our week-long series of posts where we highlight a specific part of our company culture that helps to make Financial Finesse one of America’s best places to work. This is just one part of our celebration of recent recognition by Inc., who listed us as one of the Best Workplaces in 2017 and Entrepreneur, who named us to the Small-Sized Companies: The Best Company Cultures in 2017 list.

Want more helpful financial guidance, delivered every day? Sign up to receive the Financial Finesse Tip of the Day, written by financial planners who work with people like you every day. No sales pitch EVER (being unbiased is the foundation of what we do), just the best our awesome planners have to offer. Click here to join.