How to get the most out of working with your financial planner

Pink Block Woman is on the left facing a Yellow Block on the right.

Communicate, communicate, communicate.

This is the first rule of working with a financial planner.

(It is also, by the way, the first rule of estate planning.)

If you can only remember one thing about how to have a good relationship with your financial planner, it’s a good one thing to remember.

But considering the amount of time, effort, sometimes uncomfortable introspection, and cost it takes to work with a good financial planner, it’d behoove you to figure out how to make the most out of that relationship. Yes?

Behold one financial planner’s thoughts about how you can do just that.

Ideally, the First Step Is: Hire the Right Planner at the Right Time

It’s going to be really hard to milk all the value out of the relationship with your financial planner if you hire one that you don’t jibe with very well.

I mean “jibe” in a very broad sense. You need to like their personality, their philosophy of investing and planning, and their process. If you don’t like one of those things, the relationship will likely always feel a bit like a pebble in your shoe—you can deal with it, but you’re never fully comfortable.

You have to like their “story.”

When I first changed careers into financial planning, back in 2010, I was hired into a firm with the idea that I could succeed the owner in a few years, as she was looking to sell the firm. After a few months of working at the firm, I had all sorts of anxiety about this plan.

(Spoiler alert: all those anxieties coalesced into me not buying it. Which is why I now live in Bellingham, WA, and work with women in their mid-career in tech as opposed to living in Norfolk, VA, and working with federal-government retirees.)

At that time, I had the luck of talking with a well-respected thought-leader (let’s call him Michael) in the industry about this “to buy or not to buy” choice. I mentioned that one thing giving me pause was that the retiring advisor was an “active investor.” She chose individual stocks and actively managed mutual funds, which she sold out of and bought into over time. By contrast, I have always been a passive investor: just “own the market” by way of index funds and keep costs low so that I keep as much of the market returns as possible. I don’t try to “beat the market.”

Michael told me that shifting from active to passive investing would be a hard transition to make in the firm. The clients had been told/taught/sold an active investment “story,” and I was proposing changing that to a passive story. Changing stories is really really hard.

What does this mean for you? I believe you need to make sure, before hiring a planner, that the “story” they’re telling is one that you already agree with or could see yourself agreeing with. It’s going to be bumpy if you believe one story and they’re constantly telling a different one.

I have had relationships with clients that made me feel like a bad financial planner. It didn’t seem like these clients were getting much value out of our relationship. So, by that reasonable definition, I was a bad planner. For them. (And man is that a bitter pill to swallow for someone who considers herself in fact quite a good planner.)

Upon reflection, the usual culprit was that these clients simply didn’t fully buy into the investing or planning story I was selling. It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t my client’s fault. I mean, except to the extent that neither of us identified early enough that I just didn’t offer what they wanted or needed.

Ask Yourself These Questions

When you’re on the hunt for a financial planner, interview several. I’ve written several articles about which questions you should ask when interviewing a financial planner. There are innumerable other such articles on the interwebs.

After the interview, ask yourself these questions:

Do I trust this person? Enough, at least?

Trust will definitely grow with the relationship. But starting from a position of distrust or cynicism is, IMO, a big red flag.

Do I feel comfortable (enough) talking with this person?

Personal financial planning is pretty intimate work. It’ll be way easier and more enjoyable if you like your financial planner. You don’t have to be friends. But feeling friendly is important.

Do I agree with how this person approaches financial planning and investing?

The first step here is figuring out what the planner’s approach is.

You can ask them questions directly, when interviewing them, of course.

But before you even get face to face, consume their content. This is one reason why I write so much. I have blogged consistently for nine years. I post on social media (mostly LinkedIn) all the time. I dedicate a lot of effort to the firm’s website. I want my story, Flow’s story, to be so obvious and accessible that only the people who like that story ask to work with me.

All financial planners tell a different story. Some slightly different. Some radically different. If one planner’s story doesn’t suit you, just continue looking! There are plenty of financial planners (even if sometimes maybe you don’t know how to find them).

“At the right time” = Are you ready to do the work?

Working with a financial planner will require work from you. Some of it is merely technical, but can still be administratively burdensome (“roll your old 401(k) into your new 401(k)”). Some of it has real behavioral implications (“reduce your monthly spending by $500” or “work with this estate planning attorney to ensure your estate planning is up to date”).

This is great stuff! This work will put you in a much stronger financial position! But only if you do it. If you don’t, then you’re wasting your time and money with your planner.

I recently watched a webinar about the transtheoretical model of change. I am, of course, still mostly ignorant about it, but it seems a helpful framework for evaluating whether you’re ready to get real value out of your work with a planner. The stages of change are:

  • Precontemplation: Not ready to change
  • Contemplation: Getting ready to change
  • Preparation: Ready to change
  • Action: Making changes
  • Maintenance: Sustaining changed behavior

If you’re not ready to change, maybe don’t hire a planner yet, because they won’t be able to do much for you.

Show Up As You Would in Any Relationship You Care About

Your relationship with your financial planner is, to a large extent, just another interpersonal relationship. You probably know what makes interpersonal relationships work:

  • Show respect to the other person
  • Appreciate the other person
  • Care about the other person
  • Be responsive
  • Be honest
  • Make an effort
  • Express your needs

I owe this to my clients, as their planner. And I believe they “owe” it to me. Yes, yes, they’re paying me a fee for my work and the roles and responsibilities in the relationship are different. It’s not the same as your relationship with your husband, for example.

But, I can work with clients who pay me a fee and show up in the relationship, or I can work with clients who pay me a fee and don’t show up in the relationship. Give you one guess which type of client I’m going to gravitate towards.

Communicate communicate communicate.

Give your planner feedback. Let them know what you need that you’re not getting. It makes it so much easier for me. I appreciate this feedback!

Respond promptly when your planner asks you something. If you don’t know the answer or can’t do what they’re asking you to do, simply let them know! Just don’t leave a void of communication, which the planner (if they’re anything like me) can fill with all sorts of unsettling stories that almost always turn out to be untrue.

Some of my best relationships are with clients who have, in no uncertain terms, told me about something that was lacking in the relationship. Sometimes even about an explicit mistake I made. I apologize, fix the process, and if necessary, make the client whole. The client feels heard and respected and is also more confident in our work going forward (it seems, at least).

We run annual client-feedback surveys to try to get more of this insight out of our clients, but you needn’t wait for any official “tell us what you think” requests. Tell them what you think when you’re thinking it!

There really is no downside. If you have something critical to say, then either the planner addresses that issue in a way that satisfies you (yay). Or they don’t. In which case you’ve just found out that this maybe isn’t the right planner for you after all. Not pleasant, but still a step in the right direction.

Ask Your Planner How to Get the Most Out of Working with Them

I imagine most planners would agree with what I’ve already said. I asked some colleagues how they would advise potential clients to get the most of working with a financial planner. (Please note that I circulate in comprehensive-planning-forward, emotionally attuned professional circles, which is a small part of the overall industry. If you ask, say, a stockbroker this question, I imagine you’re going to get very different answers.)

Here’s a smattering of their answers:

Come to the quarterly meetings and ask questions. Decide on an allocation [balance of stocks, bonds, cash] and stick with it. Ignore the news. Provide data when the planners ask for it. Under the markets are efficient and if the client hears something, it is already incorporated in the markets.

For retirees: Let your advisor manage your investments. The ability for an advisor to monitor flows into and out of a portfolio is one of the most under-appreciated aspects of what advisors do for clients, particularly when considering risks associated with cognitive decline and elder abuse.

The ability to put aside their ego and what they think they know, to explore with curiosity what they don’t know.

Bring your life partner, especially if you generally avoid talking about $ together.

I feel like the clients who I see make the most progress are the ones who are most engaged. They come to meetings to listen with few distractions, ask questions, and reach out proactively for guidance around decisions … instead of informing me after.

Show up, ask questions, listen, ask before acting.

The clients I work best with are the ones that come to the meeting with questions or ask questions as we’re discussing things in the meeting. They also come with updates; when asking questions about selling rental properties, they have the rent and other P&L numbers. When they have questions about investments, they have a rough idea of how much cash leftover they have each month/year.

What I think is valuable in the relationship isn’t necessarily what you think is valuable. I’ve certainly had clients for whom I thought I wasn’t providing much value who have then expressed profuse thanks for my work. Some clients who exclaim, “Please don’t fire me!” after not communicating with me for many months.

So, perhaps I’ll end with a final piece of advice:

Figure out for yourself what would make your work with your financial planner feel most valuable to you. And then communicate, communicate, communicate that to your planner.

What could you do to get more out of your relationship with your financial planner?

Protect Your Parents from Scammers.

A blurred Block Woman is next to a tall yellow block with side tufts of hair and a shorter blue block with white hair.

A couple weeks ago, I almost-not-really got scammed.

A man called me from Capital One’s fraud department to confirm that I had not, in fact, made some purchases. (No, I didn’t buy anything from Turkish Air…but that does sound kinda fun, now that you mention it.)

My guard went up pretty quickly because I’m aware (because of both my age and my profession) that scammers try to get personal information from you on the phone in this way. But it was only mildly up, so I spoke with the man for a few minutes, getting increasingly anxious. He pushed on, quashing any minor protestations of suspicion. When he finally asked me to go get my credit card so I could give him a piece of information from it, I knew it was a scam and said I’d be hanging up now. He abruptly did the honors himself.

It rattled me. Why did I spend any time on the phone with this man? I know the rules: Financial institutions (banks, credit card companies, brokerage houses, Social Security, the IRS, and on and on) will never call you and ask for information. And yet I, a cognitively healthy, informed person had not just immediately hung up. I had spent several minutes actively trying to figure out if it was a scam or not. The longer I’m on the phone, the more vulnerable I am.

If I didn’t recognize it immediately as a scam, what did this mean for my older loved ones? I mean, my parents and my aunt are all in their 80s and really healthy…but they’re still in their 80s and stuff just slows down. (Hey, Mom and Dad…wassup. Erm…you’re still great, even with your 80-year-old brains.)

This started me thinking about “What advice can I give them that is extremely easy and simple to execute that won’t require any judgement in the moment?”

I settled on advising them to say this every time a financial institution calls: “Where are you calling from? Thank you. I’m going to hang up and call back.”

Then go find the institution’s phone number (from a statement, the back of the credit card, or by typing in the URL of the website itself and finding it on the website; you can’t just search for the website because scammers can manipulate search results) and call the institution yourself. I also told my loved ones, “And you can always call me if you have any questions about what’s going on or what you should do.”

I shared these thoughts on LinkedIn, and it clearly hit a nerve. Many people reposted it. Many people shared their concerns about their own loved ones being scammed.

But what got me is that many people also shared other advice for how to deal with this situation differently or how to deal with other situations (An email! Malware on your computer! Someone at the front door!). A friend also observed that her mother would never use the script I suggested because she’d consider it rude and the mother was raised to avoid being rude at all costs.

So, while clearly people liked my specific advice, it also clearly wasn’t sufficient. But I remain committed to the idea that, whatever the solution is, it has to be simple, easy, one-size-fits-almost-all-situations, and reflexive. We can’t expect anyone to be making judgments in the moment about whether it’s a scam or not.

Why This Is So Important

You want your parents to have health insurance so that medical needs don’t bankrupt them, right? You want them to have car insurance so that if they get in an accident, they don’t need to pay out of pocket to replace an entire car or in case someone sues them for $100,000, right?

These are examples of potential economic devastation wrought by a couple different risks.

Getting scammed is a risk that can be just as disruptive and economically devastating. A big problem, it seems, is that we have no way to “offload” that risk onto anything like an insurance company. (If there is such insurance, lemme know!) So, we are left only with making sure it never happens in the first place.

From $5,000 in digital gift cards that your parents might be persuaded to buy and then give to a scammer, to unknowingly giving access to their entire bank account, and possibly their investment accounts. (Anyone else see The Beekeeper? That’s what I’m talkin ‘bout. Alas, I am not remotely as effective as Jason Statham.)

We have to take this seriously.

Stay Abreast of the Scam “Landscape”

The book Mom and Dad, We Need to Talk: How to Have Essential Conversations with Your Parents about Their Finances provides a lot of resources to help you and your parents stay up to date on current scams and how to protect yourselves:

I was going to also include the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau here, because the book mentions it, and it is reputed to be successful in helping people recover money if they’re scammed. I just don’t know what shape it will have (if any) once Elon Musk/DOGE/President Trump are done with it. Which is just so uncaring and horrible for our vulnerable loved ones.

The book has an entire chapter dedicated to “Talking to Your Parents About Scammers,” that would be a very practical how-to resource for you.

Make a Plan with Your Loved Ones

My first draft of this blog post had all sorts of specific advice about how to help your parents and other vulnerable loved ones protect themselves against scams. But there’s just so much (too much) advice out there! The blog post got longer and longer, and the longer it got, the less useful it got.

Ultimately, the best advice will really depend on the type of scam and the type of person. You know your loved ones—their finances, their personality, and their habits—better than I.

So, my advice to you is:

Take this seriously. Talk with your loved ones about it and about why it’s important to create a plan to protect themselves. Work with them to create a plan that will work for them.

  • Is it a specific script they can always say on the phone?
  • Is it a rule that they always call you before responding to any communication about finances?
  • Is it requiring your confirmation for them to move any money over, say, $500 out of their accounts?
  • Is it a rule that they never ever click any links in an email? (I could definitely benefit from following this advice, too. It’s just so ingrained!)
  • Is it a rule that if something “weird” happens on their computer (which we know could be malware), they call you before doing anything with it?
  • Is it turning over management of certain accounts to you, so they can’t move money out of it?

And then, much as you (should) revisit your financial plan regularly (say, once a year), you should revisit this issue with your loved ones regularly. People forget. Scams evolve. The world changes.

I’m not an expert on this matter. But I am enough aware of human behavior to know that whatever the plan is, it has to be simple, easy to follow, and not require judgment in the moment. It needs to be muscle memory, basically.

Even if you’re not a big-time caregiver (yet?) for your loved ones (you’re not accompanying them to medical appointments or coordinating in-home nursing care, for example), this is a kind of caregiving that you can—and should—start early. An ounce of prevention and all that.

Do you worry about vulnerable loved ones? Do you want to work with a financial planner who can help you consider your total financial picture (which is usually way bigger than you think)?