Written by Brent Cerutti, Kelly Wealth Services
In most cases potential clients look at the tangible benefits that a financial adviser can provide.
These tangible benefits are things such as:
- Investment advice,
- Tax planning,
- Superannuation advice,
- Implementing personal insurances,
- Retirement planning.
However in my experience it is often the intangible service that clients get the most benefit from. So what are these intangible benefits?
Most of the intangible benefits come from simply sitting down with an adviser to consider where they are financially and where they would like to be. It comes from working through what is important to them and what actions need to be prioritised to achieve their desired outcomes. I had a case last month where I provided retirement planning advice to a very financially sophisticated couple who were more than qualified to manage their own financial affairs.
What they didn’t have was the time to give it the attention it needed. Due to busy occupations and teenage children they had never set aside the time to talk about where they were headed both personally and financially. By engaging a financial adviser and getting asked some of the hard questions they were able to define (and negotiate) between them where they wanted to be in 5, 10 and 20 years’ time. We can then set financial strategies to achieve those goals.
So what are the intangible benefits of getting financial Advice?
- Goal setting
- Behavioural Coaching.
- Someone to be accountable to.
- Peace of Mind (Knowing someone is monitoring and advising)
- Someone to bounce ideas off.
- An adviser to help them consider financial decisions. (Often this can be stopping a client from making client an irrational or emotive financial decision)
Vanguard have done some work on quantifying the value of advice. (See below). They estimate clients achieve a 1% -2% better outcome due to the behavioural coaching alone. This does not take into account investments, tax or superannuation outcomes which advisers can also add significant value through utilising the rules to their maximum benefit.
Click here for Vanguard value of advice article
