049 PFFAP-PYP-23-0607-Seven Questions
Voiceover: [00:00:00] This show is for educational purposes only and is not personalized advice. Consult your tax advisor before taking action. All investments involve risk of loss. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Reach show notes for full disclosure. Welcome to the Physician Family Financial Advisors podcast, where physician moms and dads like you can turn today's worries about taxes and investing into all the money you need.
For retirement in college.
Ben: Hello, physician moms and dads. I'm Ben Utley, certified financial planner and service team leader here at Physician
Nate: Family. And I'm Nate Reiki, certified financial planner and primary advisor here at Physician. Family Financial Advisors have a bad reputation in the financial services industry and for good reason.
Some advisors. Are simply well disguised salespeople while others are self-serving, greedy, snake oil salesman at their worst. But that doesn't change the fact that positions you may need someone to help you navigate getting to retirement, [00:01:00] paying for college, getting out of debt, all while taking care of your family's needs today.
And it takes a trained professional with a heart for their clients to do it effectively. So today Ben, we are gonna talk about how to interview your next financial advisor and the seven questions to ask.
Ben: Nice. Yeah. Love me some seven. So
Nate: first, yeah, first I think it would be helpful to talk about what I'm calling, uh, table stakes.
Mm-hmm. So the absolute necessities to find, to even
Ben: talk to an advisor, bare minimum, rock bottom. Gotta have it. Yep.
Nate: Then after that, I think it'd be good to say kind of the, the, definitely good to haves, separating the bare minimum from the good advisors. Mm-hmm. And then talking kind of how to get from good to Great.
Ben: Okay. I'm, I'm game. Okay. All right. The first
Nate: [00:02:00] absolute necessity. Is that your advisor is a fiduciary. Mm-hmm. And, um, the seven questions is gonna become, or what the questions we're gonna give our listeners is gonna be, uh, how to figure these this out. How to figure out if they are a fiduciary is where we'll start.
Yeah. So can you tell them what, what questions they might ask?
Ben: Yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna start by defining the F word that we're banding about here today. So, yeah, a fiduciary is a person who stands in a position of trust for another. Uh, we see this with trust officers. Uh, attorneys are supposed to be fiduciaries.
It's a person who is supposed to be taking care of you and putting your interest ahead of theirs at every turn. Mm-hmm. Uh, That's, that's basically what a fiduciary is. So the question is how do you know if you're dealing with a fiduciary? There's a long answer to this that has to do with licensure, but you can ask the person, are you a fiduciary?
And in today's day and age, you're supposed to get a form c r s, [00:03:00] which stands for customer Relationship summary. And that will contain or allude to a fiduciary statement if the person is a fiduciary. Another way that you can know is if someone is registered with a Securities and Exchange commission as an investment advisor that is old school fiduciary.
People that are s e c registered Investment Advisors have been fiduciaries pretty much since 1926. Uh, our, our firm falls in that category, so that's another way that you can tell. Mm-hmm. Okay.
Nate: Yeah. And, uh, I think that for a while that used to be sort of the silver bullet question. Mm-hmm. It's been, in my opinion, uh, kind of a bit watered down over the years, so, mm-hmm.
Um, the next, you know, set of questions will really help you. Get to a person that's, that's, uh, good fit. Right? So the next, the kind of necessity here for physicians is, uh, an advisor that charges reasonable fees. [00:04:00] Yeah. Whatever that means. Ben, help me figure out what reasonable is.
Ben: It's funny because, uh, back when we charged about $300 a month, we got a lot of reasonable.
Then we raised our, our standard rates from, from there to where they are today, which is almost double, and I still get reasonable. So it's, it's not, I, I get less reasonable of course, but it's not exactly clear what reasonable is. But, um, I think, I think the real thing here about reasonable is you need to be able to make the decision.
Is this reasonable or not? I mean, you go to the grocery store and you buy yourself a, a can, ofe. You know what the price is, you know what's in the can. So you're able to make that value decision about cost versus benefit. Many people who hold themselves out as advisors, which is an, an unregulated term at this point, it's hard to know what they charge.
I mean, a person who builds a percentage of assets under management, usually they'll have a tiered fee schedule. And uh, back when we [00:05:00] had a tiered fee schedule, I had a really sharp client and I said, tell me what we charge you. And he couldn't do it. And then I sat down and I calculated it for 20 minutes and I could do it.
And we did it with a, we did it with a computer, calculate what it was. Mm-hmm. And I was like, this is too obscure. So there's a few ways that advisors charge. Uh, one way is a percentage of assets under management. Another way is a commission based on the sale of a product. So, uh, I'll give an example. Uh, a client recently came to us.
They had, uh, a $480,000. IRA that was invested in an annuity. And so it looked like the cost of that annuity was nothing because there was, you know, they wrote the check, they made the investment, and upfront there was, there was no money taken out. But when she went to surrender that annuity and do something smarter with it, she found out that the surrender charge was $48,000.
And the reason it was so large is that's the [00:06:00] commission that the selling agent made on that investment. And I don't know about you. I mean, if I sell a house, And I pay a real estate agent, 6%. That seems like a lot to me. So to pay somebody just to fill out a piece of paper and accept a check to pay, you know, 50% more than that, seems very unreasonable to me.
But she didn't know. So the question that you ask is, at some point, money is going to be transferred from my. Personal accounts, my investment accounts, my bank account, uh, some account that I have, and it's going to go into an account that's just for you, your business, or your pocket personally. Not the amount that I'm gonna invest with you, but the amount that you get that I never get back.
How much is that? And the BS answer here is, oh, don't worry about it. My company pays me. Well, that may be true, but you're gonna pay the company and you want to ask the question, how much will I pay the company in [00:07:00] the next 12 months? How much will I pay the company next year? How much will I pay the company if I leave you in the next two years?
And how much comp will I pay the company over the next five or 10 years? And folks, what you're looking for here is a dollar figure. Not a percentage, you know, 1%, 2%, half percent, it doesn't matter. You're looking for a dollar figure. Because if you've got a $5 billion investment and somebody wants $50,000, that's 1%.
But if they just say 1%, it sounds like, eh, that's not a lot. But $50,000. I mean, there are a lot of people in the economy that don't make $50,000. So to me that seems unreasonable. Um, but you know, It, it, it varies. What's reasonable to you? Um, my favorite way to, to bill and in fact, the only way we bill is a flat monthly fee.
So you know exactly how much you're paying. You can see it coming out of your checking account, and you can be the judge of value there. So, uh, whatever you do, make sure that you ask longitudinally, you know, this [00:08:00] year, next year, what if I leave you and tell me in real dollars? I wanna know how much it's going to actually cost me.
Yeah,
Nate: it's really, um, hopefully, Well, what I'm hearing from this is, this is permission to ask from from people in the industry because I think that for most folks that I speak with, it is just an uncomfortable conversation to ask questions like that. Mm-hmm. And when you're making the decision at the grocery store, the price tag is right there.
You don't have to negotiate anything or it's feels like a negotiation. You either put it in your cart or you don't, and this is just not like
Ben: that. How would you feel if you went to a childcare provider? Mm-hmm. And the childcare and you said, what does it cost for you to pro, uh, provide care for my child?
And they said, oh, really? Nothing. You know, the company pays me. Yeah. Like, I would be on high alert, you know? I mean, yeah. I can't imagine all the terrible things that could happen. But when it comes to money, people are, are hesitant to ask for some reason. I don't know why that is, but if you think about it, [00:09:00] our industry is the only industry without a price tag.
I mean, if you buy a nuclear submarine, you know how much it's gonna be. If, if you buy a golf club, you know how much it's gonna be. If you, you know, if you buy diapers, you know how much it's gonna be. This, this is the only industry we have no idea what it's gonna be. And that's ridiculous.
Nate: Yeah, it is. Okay.
So this will hopefully keep you away from, you know, bad actors, fiduciary, reasonable fees.
Ben: That's like nine tenths of the battle right there. Mm-hmm.
Nate: But how do you get from reasonable to. Good. And we came up with, with three questions you should ask. One is about credentials. So, um, there's lots of credentials out there, Ben.
Yeah. I'm sort of, uh, curious, you know, we're certified financial planners, but how would you go about asking about their credentials and if they're
Ben: relevant to you? Well, I'm not even sure that I would ask. Uh, this is like, this is something you check on the website. Right? Mm-hmm. So you, you look for [00:10:00] the marks, um, the, the, like, the gold standard in credentials for financial advisors is the certified financial planner designation, or the CFP mark.
Uh, it's followed by a registered trademark because it's a trademark of the Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards, also known as the CFP board. Uh, I won't bore you with all the stuff that goes into getting that, but that's the gold standard for mark's after person's name. Um, I would feel okay dealing with a cpa.
If they also had some other mark, uh, there are are CFAs, so those are chartered financial analysts, and you could expect just investment advice out of a CFA because that's, that's all they're trained for in cfa. But gold standard is cfp. If you see other things with CS after it and you don't see the CFP mark, uh, it's, it's no bueno.
Mm-hmm. Okay.
Nate: So yeah, you're checking to see what their credentials are and, and you're looking for a cfp, if you can. Right. All right. The [00:11:00] next one is big picture planning. Mm-hmm. So, uh, everybody is told, at least in, in our world, most people come come to our desk and they want planning, but they don't necessarily know.
Exactly why. I mean, I think a, a, a roadmap is the simplest way to put it. Mm-hmm. But how do you find out, you know, if they're a good planner or if they're planning in your best interests, like what questions do
Ben: you ask about planning? Right. And, and here we have another unregulated term, the word financial planner without the word certified in front of it.
Is nothing, it's it's wet toilet paper. Mm-hmm. It's just as strong as advisor or council, you know, it's a, it's kind of the same nothing thing. So many, many people call financial advisors, financial planners. Those terms are, are interchangeable. But if you are dealing with a planner, somebody who is capable of planning, you will know it because they will talk about the plan and you will have a plan.
[00:12:00] And a plan at very least, contains a goal. Usually it contains, contains calculations from projections about how things might turn out if you follow their advice. And of course, it includes the advice. These are things that feel like a plan that aren't a plan. Here we go. So dashboards, right? So a dashboard where it just kind of tracks your income, it tracks your net worth.
That's not a plan. That's maybe a measurement. It's, it's useful and it's part of the planning process, but that's not a plan Yellow pad, not a plan. Mere checklist, not a plan. A plan looks at what you, where you want to go, where you are now. How to connect the dots and specifically what to do if you have that, you've got a plan.
Mm-hmm. So no plan, not really a planner, probably an asset gatherer who's billing 1% or, uh, you know, somebody who's, who's selling stuff. Mm-hmm.
Nate: Mm-hmm. Yeah. The plan is really important and, and I think a lot of [00:13:00] times new doctors that come in the door mm-hmm. They're viewing it as in the way of doing what they really want to do,
Ben: which is invest.
Right. But, and, and a lot of times we see that because people are coming to us from, uh, from quote unquote advisors who just handled their investments and they're like, I, I want to get away from that guy. He's, it's a guy and, you know, I, I just want to get my investments invested again. But the thing that makes, makes the investments make sense is to have a plan that's built around 'em.
I mean, imagine that you take your child to the orthodontist. And the orthodontist puts that, that kid in the chair and they're, and they just turn around with you and they say, Hey, no worries. We're just gonna take care of it. You know, with straight teeth, no idea how long it takes. No idea how many teeth are gonna get pulled.
No idea how much pain your child is gonna be in no idea whether you're gonna have to, you know, have all the. The, uh, rubber bands and the plastic stuff in their mouth, headgear, you got no idea about that. You don't have any idea how long it takes. So when your kid wakes up in the middle of the night with a sore jaw, you have no [00:14:00] idea whether that's part of the plan expected, mm-hmm.
Or not. And same, same story happens. You know, when something gets derailed with your plan or your investments, you don't have a frame of reference for that. So the plan is the scaffolding that holds up the investment, and perhaps insurance products and mortgages, and all those other good things that are sold.
Two people. The plan is a, is a thing that, that makes you feel comfortable and confident that you're doing the right thing and headed in the right direction. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Nate: Okay. So, um, I think that was all great, but what exactly do you ask about
Ben: the plan? Uh, describe to me, uh, a, do do you prepare a financial plan for me?
B. Mm-hmm. Uh, tell me what it contains. Uh, how many pages long is it, uh, what's in it? Is it, is it gonna be a deliverable? Is it gonna be an actual document that I get, that I can hold and I could print out? Is it something that only lives on the web? Um, if I leave you, can I take this plan with [00:15:00] me? Uh, other questions are, um, what do you do with this plan after it's delivered?
Do you look back at it? Do you monitor the progress? What's your, mm-hmm. What's your strategy for monitoring? Monitoring that progress? Like how do you keep up with whether or not I'm on track with a plan? I'm shocked about the number. Well, first off, there are not a lot of advisors who prepare a plan.
Second of those who prepare a plan, many, many of them never look back at it. It's essentially a sales tool for an investment product. So a real planner will prepare a plan and help you stick to the plan and refer back to the plan so you know whether or not you're making progress. Terrific. Sorry, that was more than one question to ask.
Nate: Yeah, yeah. Get to the bottom of what the
Ben: planning process. I think this is gonna turn into 21 questions to ask, you know, so
Nate: Yeah. Well, I'll, I'll wrap us up cuz the, the, the plan is critical. I mean, it, the, what, what, what I was getting at there was if you, if your advisor doesn't have a plan, I don't know how.
They're going to adjust [00:16:00] when your life changes or something. Right. Changes in your life. They, I mean, yeah. So, uh, next, next kind of box to check for a good advisor is really exceptional communication. Ah, and, okay. This is a, a tough to ask a specific question. Mm-hmm. But I think you have a couple that is, are a good start.
Ben: Okay, so this is, this is a fantastic thing. It's hard to measure. However, so far we've talked about four, maybe 28 questions to ask your next financial advisor, and if you are not able to get a straight answer to those questions. That's a bad sign. Mm-hmm. If you get a glib answer from those questions, that's a bad sign.
If you're immediately handed off to someone to ask your questions, that's a bad sign. You want the person who's in front of you to be able to answer your questions, not at a technical level where you're like, what are they [00:17:00] talking about? I barely understand you. And a person that will explain something and pause.
And ask you whether or not you understand and pause and give you time to think about it and clarify and allow you to say things back and speak in a language that makes sense to you. You know, give, give an analogy that's maybe based on something that's, uh, medical or in your field, you know, something that's relatable until you feel comfortable that you actually understand both the topic of your conversation and the answers to their questions.
And you might have to be, you know, on the phone or, or on, you know, zoom with them for a little bit before you, before you get that. But they should be an attentive listener. That's the first key in communications, and they should be clearly spoken. When they, when they answer back. And if I was gonna throw a cherry on top of that, I would say they should be kind of a natural teacher.
They should be interested in educating you about the thing that you're discussing.
Nate: Agreed. Okay. The quick [00:18:00] recap. Okay. So, okay. Fiduciary, are you a fiduciary? Mm-hmm. Reasonable fees. What exactly do you charge? How much will I pay you or your company? Mm-hmm. Looking for a dollar figure. Mm-hmm. Uh, what are your credentials?
Or you can look up, is there CFP behind their name on, on their website.
Ben: Mm-hmm.
Nate: What does your planning process look like? Including following up with the plan. Mm-hmm. And, um, I was thinking a good question would be, uh, about communication. Mm-hmm. Would be. Something along the lines of how do I get in touch with you?
How often do we get in touch and, you know, uh, for us, we will promise how quickly we get back to by clients, by email, right? Um, but also this is a judgment call that if you're getting straight answers from them with all these other questions, they're likely going to be a good [00:19:00] communicator.
Ben: Yeah. Yeah.
That's a good sign. That's where we're at so far.
Nate: So now I want to sort of tease out. The great advisors from the merely good. Mm-hmm. And this is difficult to find a, at this point in the game, it is difficult to find an advisor who also has these great qualities. Mm-hmm. But if you can find them, you, you may have just found sort of a lifetime advisor, someone who you can really trust and your family can trust for decades.
Mm-hmm. So the first is specialization. Mm-hmm. And with physicians, there are advisors who specifically specialize in physicians, but there are also some that say they specialize in physicians, but they don't exactly specialize. They specialize in physicians and a little bit of lawyers and a little bit of engineers.
Ben: They specialize in everybody and.
Nate: And [00:20:00] everybody. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so how do you get down to the bottom of if they actually get you
Ben: right? I guess the first question I would ask is, okay, you say that you serve physicians, how many do you serve? Mm-hmm. You know, is it four? Is it 40? Is it, you know, how many, how many do you serve?
And what do you, what do you consider a physician? Is that a dentist? Is that a chiropractor? You know, uh, is it, do, do you have three primary care docs that you're serving? You know, what, what is a physician? I would also say like what makes a physician's situation unique and different? So I'll give you an example.
Uh, we brought on a client recently who was paying their old advisor $45,000 a year. Okay. Well it was 1% of a whole bunch of money. And you know, that's kind of the go on rate these days, even though I find it exorbitant. But I found out the reason the guy was calling me. Is he said, you know, I, I recently set up my backdoor [00:21:00] Roth, and I said, you, you mean your advisor set it up?
He said, no, I had to found, find out myself on the internet that this is a strategy that I should use. And, uh, I, yeah, so I did my own backdoor Roth, and I said, oh, okay, well, all right. And I, I just thought, well, I see that a lot. It's not great. Uh, so he's been missing out on the backdoor Roth strategy for about a decade, uh mm-hmm.
And I said, um, okay, well, what else? And he said, well, and I also set up a spousal. Ira and I said, and did your advisor tell you to do that? And he said, no, I had to figure that out on my own. And the reason he contacted us is cuz he heard the Roth podcast. So, oh my gosh. You know, that's like, that's, that's table stakes.
That's like an entry level strategy for physicians that pretty much all physicians should be doing. And he'd gone with this guy for about 10 years, paid him about a half million dollars over that time. And was never exposed to this very basic strategy. Mm-hmm. And to put this in perspective, we did over 100 backdoor Roth conversions last [00:22:00] year.
This is just, it's just a beginner strategy for physicians. Okay? Mm-hmm. So, The specialization makes a difference in knowing what to do. I think specialization helps in terms of communicating, you know, uh, being able to speak in a person's language and, and, you know, make, make things approachable for them.
So, yeah. I feel like I got off the topic on that, on that question a little bit. Nate, can you well
Nate: reel me back? I don't think, I don't think you did, but I, I actually, without getting into details, Too deeply. I think it's important that when you ask an advisor about their specialization mm-hmm. This is not being a needy client.
Right. And I, I get that a little bit from the physicians we speak with. Like they, they are just people. Mm-hmm. But they have a specific circumstance that takes a specific strategy. And if you are working with an advisor who works with the general public, it is so difficult to know. Like just at the snap of their [00:23:00] fingers to know exactly what to do with your situation, right?
So that it, it literally is for your success with your personal finances. It is not you being needy or wanting to talk to somebody who you know, just is easier to talk to. Um, here, here's the reason I know that, uh, most advisors are after this. These big clients who are usually nearing retirement. Mm-hmm.
Because those big clients that are nearing retirement, they have built up assets for years and years and years, and they get to roll it over into the advisors, under the advisor's care and they get a big payday for it.
Ben: Yeah.
Nate: So when, as a physician, especially, uh, you know, early forties physician mm-hmm.
They are looking at you like a future payday. Right. Once your assets get built up and get to in your 401K and everything gets to get rolled over to them. Mm-hmm. And so they don't really take much time to understand your [00:24:00] current situation. And if they do, you're lucky. And if they do a good job, they're probably not doing it very efficiently.
Ben: You know, we were on a call together recently where we, uh, spoke with a relatively new client, and in the course of that call, he asked four questions about college planning. And, you know, you took those calls, you're, you're our college planning specialist and mm-hmm. There were three of those questions that I was like slightly out of my depth, and there's one that I was spot on and they're relatively new developments, and at that moment I thought it's really cool to have a specialist on staff who gets this.
Uh, we had a housing call the other day in the housing specialist had answers right on the tip of their tongue about the current raid environment. There was a cool strategy for being able to, you know, finance a, a house without, without, uh, moving on. And it just solved a great problem and I thought, wow.
Mm-hmm. You know, uh, There's, there's no way that I could do that if I had to know. All this knowledge and detail, because it's a broad field. I mean, we have, we have four [00:25:00] advisors, and each one of us has at least one specialization. Some of us have two or three, and it takes that whole team to really, you know, dig out all the nuggets and kernels mm-hmm.
At, at depth rather than at high level and just glossing over things. So it's, it's not only having an advisor who specializes, but I would say a, a firm that specializes and specialists among the specialization. Right? Mm-hmm. So, um, you know, way, way early on after we'd had our children, uh, I was talking to some of my physician clients and I was like, yeah, we're done having kids.
And one of 'em was like, well, so you're gonna get the snip snip, you know, you're gonna, are you gonna tie the tubes? And I said, yeah, I'm, I'm gonna do that. And he said, who are you gonna use? And I said, well, I don't know. I was just thinking about going to my primary care doc. And he said, listen, go to a urologist.
You want somebody who's done a thousand of these things, not somebody who's done a couple this year. Mm-hmm. And I had a, one of my friends, an attorney, did not follow that advice and wound up with a bad outcome. Uh, and, and in this case, a bad outcome was an extra kid that they didn't see coming. Oh, wow.
You know, there [00:26:00] is something I just, just kind of thought, well, you know, it's, it's just a, it's just a thing. It's supposed to be pretty simple, but, um, even the simple things, there's, there's usually a nuance to it. I mean, you know, if you're an orthopedist and you know, shoulders like, you know everything about shoulders, right?
Mm-hmm. If you're, uh, in a gynecological surgeon, then you know all kinds of details about that. I mean, there's, as any specialist will tell you, there's a lot to it. And, uh, they don't color outside their lines. You know, you mm-hmm. You don't, you don't take your child to, uh, a doctor to get, uh, teeth help and you don't take 'em to a dentist, you know, when they have a cold.
Like, that's the reason we have specializations. Uh, and, and that's one of the reasons that we specialize in that somebody's seeking an advisor should choose a specialist. Mm-hmm.
Nate: Okay. So question six is, how long have you served, served people like me? And how many people like me do
Ben: you serve? Yeah. Yeah.
And kind of what makes us, what makes us different, you know? Mm-hmm. Prove to me that you actually know something about people like me. Yeah. [00:27:00]
Nate: Okay. So here's the last one, and, and it's even harder to quantify than it is the specialization. Mm-hmm. And that is the advisor or the firm's values, so, right. Um, W
Ben: let's flesh that out.
So I'm gonna, I'm gonna tell a story about this. So, about a decade ago, uh, I was being recruited to join another firm. Like, they took me out to lunch and they sat me down. And at this point I had already done all my leadership studies, so I, I knew like, uh, if I was gonna do this, like what kind of leader I was looking for in the firm that I joined.
And so I had all the leadership at the table as, as two folks. And I said, tell me what value. Drives your firms like, like what, what is the, what is the thing that, that you want to be known for? And they said, we want to be the most respected firm in this region. And I thought, well, it's clear what their value is, but [00:28:00] I don't see any value in that value, you know, to be the most respected.
I mean like, honestly that's just like a man answer, you know? It's, I want everybody to look up to me cuz I wanna be a big boy, right? Uh, and I wasn't, I wasn't thrilled with that. I just didn't. Just, just didn't register for me. It wasn't a differentiator, it didn't, didn't make any sense. And I just, ah, nah.
You know? Mm-hmm. So, uh, I think that if you're, if you're speaking with someone on the team, or a salesperson or the advisor that you're choosing, you wanna ask 'em like, what values drive you? What are your personal values? And, uh, what are your firm's values? They should have a clear vision statement that people walk by inside that firm to let you know, like, what?
What is behind the firm? You know, what, what's the undertone here? What's the, what are the invisible rules that guide actions inside the firm? Mm-hmm. So, um, not surprisingly, we, we have flushed this out. Uh, we've been living by our values for the last 10 years. Uh, I've [00:29:00] changed those values. Twice in that time, I changed two values.
So here they are. So the uh, the first one is curiosity. So you want your financial advisor to look very deeply to learn to be interested in things rather than just passing over things. So you want 'em to be curious. Okay. Financial advising is an act of service. It's a service business. And so humility is a quality that you want to have where they'll listen to you.
They don't. Act as if they know everything. Maybe they're learning something. It's like the mind of a beginner. So to have humility, improvement is one of our values. We wanna improve what happens in our firm, but we also wanna improve what happens with our clients. The client experience, uh, your personal finances, we wanna see improvement.
Otherwise, you know, why would you, why would you go to an advisor? Why would you go to anyone if you didn't want to improve something? Right? So improvement is a value. This is gonna sound really hallmark and you'll never see me putting it on, you know, in written statements on the internet. But you want somebody who cares, [00:30:00] somebody who actually will get down on the trenches with you when times are tough and, and be there for you.
And so for us, we encapsulate that with a term love. So I know that word is bandi around a lot. Oh, we love our clients. You know, I think love is something that you get at home. It's something you get in the first five or six years of your life. Uh, it's, it's something you carry with you. It's something that you can read off of other people.
I think it would be very difficult to love someone. And treat them poorly at the same time, I think it'd be difficult to love someone and treat them, charge them unreasonable fees, right? I mean, or to, to throw them into something that they shouldn't have or to be unconcerned when they, when they send an email.
It'd be hard to do that with love, right? I mean, if you have a good relationship with your parent, they're gonna reach out to you, you're gonna reach back to them, you're gonna feel a connection there. They're gonna respond to your emails, they're gonna take your phone calls. There's love there. And the last one is determination.
So this is really an internal value. Uh, I think [00:31:00] that the financial industry is, is difficult to make it in. I know this cuz I've been at it almost 30 years and, uh, there are tough times like, you know, when the market corrects or when the Federal Reserve does something stupid or the tax laws change, it can be really challenging.
So I think determination is one of those values, and those values collectively, C H I L D just happen to spell the word child. And that's the term that we use when we, when we break out and we close our weekly team huddles, just as a reminder of why we're here, how we function, what we do, and why we do it.
So Nate, give us today's big takeaway.
Nate: The big takeaway today is don't be afraid to ask questions. And if you can't get a straightforward answer from the advisor you're interviewing, uh, keep looking,
Ben: right? Pretty simple. So that's all for today's show. Thanks for joining us, and until next time, remember, you're not just making a living.
You're making a life.
Voiceover: Thank you for listening to the [00:32:00] Physician Family Financial Advisors podcast. Are you getting all the tax breaks you really deserve? To find out, get your copy of the Overtax Doctor's Retirement Investing checklist [email protected] slash go.
