Financial Planning For Canadian Business Owners

Jason talks to Robb Engen, the Fee-only Financial Planner and Blogger at Boomer and Echo. Robb is a well-known voice in the Canadian financial blogosphere, and he has run a blog for 11 years and is one of the recognized voices in Canadian online finance.

Episode Highlights:

• 01.35: Robb has run the Boomer and Eco personal finance blog since 2010. About six years ago, he started a fee-only financial planning service to help regular people approach big-burning financial stages of their lives.
• 02.48: Jason asks Robb, as per experience as a DIY advocate, what are the common person triggers for someone with a simple situation for the need to seek out advice in the first place? 
• 05.00: According to Robb, there is a bit of inherent bias in the type of people seeking him out because not many people know about fee-only or later fee-for-service financial planning. 
• 07.03: Robb talks about passive investing. He set up his couch potato portfolio seven years ago before these new kinds of solutions came on board, and being aware of the other products on the DIY spectrum is important. 
• 09.07: As per Jason, there is a marketing lesson for any advisor out there, and there is also a marketing lesson for any clients seeking advice and finding someone who speaks an advisor’s language in marketing. 
• 19.43: Putting your message out transparently is important, says Robb.
• 23.00: People lose clients because you didn’t engage the spouse, the spouse that was engaged died, or the other person felt they are not heard, and it is a challenge, says Jason.
• 25.50: Advisors should be transparent about what they are going to be doing with your money so that you can now move on to the other important factors, says Robb.
• 27.33: Fee-only planning is not something you can scale because every situation is different, says Robb.
• 35.35” Robb suggests that at some point in your life, a little voice in your head will go, “Am I doing the right thing?” If that little voice is telling you that maybe it is time to reach out and get the conversation started with an advisor and see where that can add some value for you.

3 Key Points:

1. The larger sums of money could come in a couple of different scenarios. One is someone taking the commuted value of their pension when they leave their work workplace, and another one, like an inheritance or maybe you sold the rental property or your primary residence.
2. Robb answers, what happens if old males don’t have the mental capacity or expire before their partner does? They don’t want their spouse to go and walk into the big bank and hand over investments or portfolios of stocks to the mutual fund portfolio.
3. In the validator model, people do the right things. They want a second set of eyes just to walk them through and make sure there are no holes to poke through the plan. 

Tweetable Quotes

• “Many advisors struggle in explaining their value to clients, and it may be because those aren’t the clients you should be having, and maybe that service doesn’t match up with them.” – Jason
• “Refining who my client is is really important as well.” – Robb
• “Based on US research, 60 to 100 is the range for a number of engagements on a planning level that you can maintain in the course of a year.” – Jason

Resources Mentioned

• Facebook – Jason Pereira’s Facebook
• Robb Engen – Website 
• LinkedIn – Jason Pereira’s LinkedIn