What Clients Really Care About (from our 2023 and 2024 Client Feedback Surveys). Do You Agree?

Two Block People on either side of a piece of wood for a table with a multi-colored puff ball above them.

After two years of annual client-feedback surveys, I have learned two important things:

  1. I suck at writing client-feedback surveys.
  2. Talking with a financial planner who really knows and cares for you is extremely valuable. Maybe the most valuable.

As for #1, let’s say only that I am thankful for clients who, as it turns out, run customer-feedback surveys for giant tech companies and are experts in the matter, and furthermore are willing to share their thoughts after year one’s sub-optimal effort.

Moving on…

As you read below about what clients get out of meeting and talking with us, I’d love for you to take a moment to imagine what it could be like for you to have someone (a financial planner) in your life whom you could meet with and talk with in this way. Would you love it as much as our clients do? If so, what is holding you back from working with a planner?

The not-well-made-but-still-useful 2023 survey and the 2024 survey gave us many insights, but the biggest one across both surveys was: Clients value meeting with us. A lot. (Most clients, most of the time.)

From 2023’s survey, we learned that clients want meetings more proactively scheduled between their Annual Renewal Meetings. We had been proactive about scheduling that one, lynchpin meeting every year. But we often then left it up to them to reach out when they wanted to meet mid-year. (Turns out, wanting to meet and getting around to scheduling a meeting are two very different things. As a result, some clients weren’t meeting with us as often as they wanted.)

So, in 2024, we made a simple but surprisingly powerful change: In our annual meeting, we scheduled not only next year’s annual meeting but also a mid-year meeting with the client.

Usually, that mid-year meeting is six months out. If there is something specific going on in a client’s life that needs sooner or more frequent conversations, we schedule meetings accordingly. Clients now always have at least one meeting with us on the calendar, which you know is reassuring! (Well, almost always, because I can’t guarantee anything.)

From 2024’s survey, we learned that, out of many different things we do for clients (tax return review, open enrollment advice, email reminders, etc.), clients value the meetings, or perhaps more accurately, the conversations with us the most.

Why do clients get out of these meetings? The meetings can (paraphrased from the survey responses):

  • Remind clients of The Big Picture
  • Provide accountability
  • Answer tough questions
  • Give peace of mind
  • Provide reassurance that someone is looking at all this finance stuff and that the plans are on track (or that we’ll tell you if they’re not!)
  • Help you navigate big life events (like having your first child)

What Does This Mean for How We Serve Clients?

Happily, I don’t think we need to change much in order to honor the feedback we got from clients. We’ve worked hard over the last several years to find a cadence of meetings and a focus for our meetings each year that serves both our clients and us well. (As it turns out, serving one well is often synonymous with serving the other well.)

The cadence of:

One Big, Comprehensive Annual Renewal Meeting
+
One Mid-Year Check-In Meeting

is good for most of our clients most of the time.

Some clients, some years, need more meetings. Either their lives or their finances are going through something challenging or complex (Having a baby! Moving! Going through an IPO! Buying a home!), and we simply need to talk more frequently. Cool. That’s the nature of the work. It waxes and wanes.

You’d like to think that “finances! So objective! So number! I can certainly just create a well-defined process and calendar around this, press Start, and off we go, in perpetuity.”

And yet. And yet.

One of my favorite ideas is that my job as a financial planner is “to be there when you need us.” Hell, it’s even on our website!

The challenge? “When you need us” is pretty unpredictable. So how do we run our business so that we can reliably “be there for you when you need us”?

I need two things to be able to honor this value:

  1. the time to meet with you
  2. enough of the the right energy to meet with you

To get both of those things, I think the solution is:

  • Have few enough clients. Fewer clients = lower level of recurring work = I have space in my calendar and a sense of “spaciousness” for those higher-need situations.
  • Having a personal practice like meditation. This helps me show up for you in a way that is grounded, receptive, and curious.

We already do those two things (though I benefit from continually reminding myself of their importance). So I won’t be making any dramatic changes based on these survey results.

Sure, there are some tweaks to further refine how we work with clients. I can’t imagine that will ever go away. But we seem to have gotten the most important stuff right, and I want to continue to enable me and the rest of the team at Flow to continue to do that.

Other Things Clients Value

Lest you think that the only thing clients get out of this work are our sparkling conversational skills, clients also called out that they value:

  • Us following up with them to make sure their tasks get done
  • Quick responses
  • Attention to detail
  • Knowing that they can reach out to us any time about pretty much whatever
  • The personal updates in our quarterly client newsletter (Everyone always wants to know about Janice’s cows, Yerim’s and my dogs, the family trips, and sometimes the not-so-pleasant updates, like scary health diagnoses!)

I’ve only done feedback surveys for two years now, so there’s a lot we haven’t asked clients about. But it was interesting (and helpful and reassuring) to see this trend already just two years in.

I’m looking forward to exploring more aspects of our client relationships and service and value in future years and see what else we can unearth from our clients. The goal is always to identify what our clients want and need, not what I think they want and need, to be happier with both their relationship with us and with their lives and finances.

Would you find it valuable to work with someone who deeply knows you and your finances and who is committed to being there for you when you need her? Reach out and schedule a free consultation or send us an email.

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Not “CAN I retire early?” but “HOW do I retire early?” Making a Retirement Plan When You’re Still Young.

Block Woman gazes at a wall calendar with a beach scene and a date circled on the calendar page.

“When can I retire?”
“Can I retire when I’m 55?”

Our clients, many in their 30s or 40s, ask us such questions all the time.

The thing is, if all you do is ask me about the “when” of retiring, I can’t tell you anything useful. Why? Because there are two other huge variables that we need to look at:

  1. How much you’ll spend during your retirement (which dictates how much money you need when you start retirement)
  2. How much you will save between now and retirement (which influences how much money you will have when you start retirement)

Those are the three basic levers you have to push and pull when making a plan for your eventual retirement:

  1. When
  2. Spending in retirement
  3. Saving/growing your wealth between now and then

You know that old product development saw? Good, cheap, and fast…pick any two.
You can apply the same logic to retirement planning.

You get to pick two of the variables listed above. The other is simply a result of those two choices.

So, if you ask me “Can I retire early?” I will likely say, like the language pedant I was raised to be, “Sure you can!”

But the more interesting question is: How do you retire early? That “how” gets into the trade-offs you have to make, the priorities you have to choose.

Please note: Retirement planning, when you get close to and in retirement, can get really detailed. If we were discussing retirement at that stage, I’d be looking at questions like “Do you live entirely off your investment portfolio? Do you buy annuities? Do you use a bucketing strategy?” By contrast, in this blog post, I’m addressing the question of retirement planning when you’re still many years—and many life events—away.

What Do You Even Mean, “Retire”?

If you come to me when you’re 40 and ask, “When can I retire?” the first thing I’ll probably do is explore a bit more what you mean by “retire.”

For a lot of people, it does not mean you want to stop working forever. It’s more of a “financial independence” goal than a “retire” goal. It’s often because people don’t really like their work life and cannot fathom doing it for another few decades.

This can open up conversations about changing the direction of your career sooner rather than later, not just grinding through another 10, 20 years of your current career that you actively don’t like, just to reach the point of not having to work anymore.

This is one of those cases where the question you ask (“Can I retire early?”) might not be the right one. But it’s a helpful start to an exploration of what your true question really is.

It’s also possible that you’re not chomping at the bit to get to retirement as soon as possible, but you do want to have an idea (any idea!) of your retirement trajectory. As a client once asked (I paraphrase): I’m saving all this money. But what does it mean? What kind of retirement is this setting me up to have?

The Limitations of Planning for Retirement 20 Years Ahead of Time

I’m gonna go on the record right now and say that multi-decade projections of any sort, but specifically here, of saving and spending levels, are utter bunk. I know, totes controversial. I’m over here, stirring it up, making waves…yelling into the void.

Try to remember what your life was like 10 years ago. Feel it, see it, imagine it. Looking forward from that perspective, could you have imagined half of what has happened since then, and what your life looks like now?

I know I couldn’t have. When I was 38, I never would have spent $25k to take my family to Europe (I mean, aside from the fact that my kids were 4 and 1 at the time). And yet I did that earlier this year, with pleasure. Nor had I any concept of starting my own firm as a financial planner and enjoying this work so much that I can see doing it for decades more (which enables me to continue to earn and save, and delay the age at which I need to draw on my retirement portfolio).

That said, in order to plan, we have to have some sense of our destination. And so we make our best guess with the information we have now and make a plan around that. Time passes. We are that little bit closer to the goal, we gather more information, and re-do our guess. That guess is now a little more accurate, and we can make a little more accurate (and reliable) plan for your retirement. But it’s iterative, over time.

Because of the “make a guess, let time pass, reevaluate” nature of the work, I don’t see merit in getting hyper specific. But I do encourage you to revisit this high-level retirement projection regularly, as you draw closer to retiring. We do it once a year for some clients, less frequently for other clients.

Solving for “When,” Spending Level, and Savings

The way I look at it, you have three variables that determine your retirement projection, more specifically, three variables that you have control over. (You can’t, by contrast, control stock market returns or inflation.)

  1. When do you want to retire?
  2. How much will you spend in retirement?
  3. How much will you save each year between now and retirement?

As I hope you can see, you can combine these variables in an infinitude of ways.

Are you most concerned with retiring by the age of 50 and spending a lot on travel once retired (and we guess that results in yearly spending of $200k/year)? Great! No problem. That means we’ll calculate how much you need to save and grow that bucket of money between now and that target retirement age.

Or are you more concerned with enjoying life (which costs $150k/year, leaving you with $80k/year to save) over your whole life (your kids are young and under your roof for only so long, after all), and you are willing to work as long as it takes? Great! That means we’ll calculate how many more years you have to work (in other words, your retirement age) so that you have enough years to save and grow your money.

For those of you who remember high school math somewhat fondly, you might recognize the problem: “If you have three variables, you need three equations to solve the problem. With only one equation, you can’t solve the problem.”

In this retirement projection, we don’t have three equations, we have only one. That singular “equation” is your one big, beautiful path to retirement. So, we have to simply assign values to two of the variables. Now we have only one variable to solve for, which we can do! (Ha ha! Remember kvetching in highschool math about “When am I ever gonna need this?” Looks like you shouldn’t have besmirched the good names of Gödel, Newton, and Euclid after all!)

We can easily run this calculation 100 different ways, to help you get a handle on the possibilities. (Yay, software.) But in all cases, you need to tell me the value for two of the variables, and we can see how that affects that third variable.

The Hardest Thing to Know: How Much Will You Spend in Retirement?

Of the three variables at play here, the least intuitive for our clients is how much you’ll spend in retirement.

Your easiest (and not unreasonable!) guess for how much you’ll spend in 20 years is simply what you spend now (adjusted for inflation).

There are, however, a few major spending categories that you can adjust, to make your guess… reasonable-er:

  1. Subtract from current spending:
    1. Childcare. This is a huge expense with a known end date.
    2. Housing. If you have a mortgage now, will it be paid off in retirement? That would leave “only” property tax and insurance (and, of course, ongoing required maintenance and optional upgrades).
  2. Add to current spending:
    1. Health insurance and care. Do you currently have health insurance provided by your employer? Will you need to get your own health insurance when you retire? If you retire before you’re eligible for Medicare (and can’t get on a spouse’s plan), then you will. If you move to the Affordable Care Act, either the insurance or your out-of-pocket expenses will likely be way higher than it is now. Even with Medicare, you’ll likely need to buy supplemental health insurance or Medicare Parts B and D.
    2. More leisure spending. You will, after all, have more leisure.

I honestly wouldn’t try to get more nuanced than this. It would provide precision without accuracy (which can be dangerously reassuring), given how far in the future this spending will occur.

I know I haven’t given you the exact equations or spreadsheet or software tool or all the assumptions (inflation rate, growth of investments) you need to actually solve this “equation.” That was on purpose. There are plenty of free calculators online. If you work with a financial planner, they’ll probably use industry-specific software with a lot more knobs and buttons.

I think it’s more important to understand the mental framework of creating a retirement projection so far in advance. Only once you understand that do all the calculations and tools become actually useful to you.

Which two variables are most important to you?

How would it feel to understand how you’re progressing towards your eventual retirement? Reach out and schedule a free consultation or send us an email.

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Disclaimer: This article is provided for educational, general information, and illustration purposes only. Nothing contained in the material constitutes tax advice, a recommendation for purchase or sale of any security, or investment advisory services. We encourage you to consult a financial planner, accountant, and/or legal counsel for advice specific to your situation. Reproduction of this material is prohibited without written permission from Flow Financial Planning, LLC, and all rights are reserved. Read the full Disclaimer.