Financial Planning: Get Your Clients to Save More

In the fact finder, you don’t want just to gather the facts, as the name implies. You also want to gather some feelings. You want to see where the client perceives he has spending pain points—as opposed to you just telling him things. You want to ask questions to find out how he feels about his spending.

Everybody has pain points; it’s just a matter of finding them. Your job is to help the client discover it for himself. In A lot of your clients will say, “I’m pretty good.” Let’s say the client makes enough money that he really is spending less than what he is making. However, he may still be blowing some money in some areas that he really doesn’t need to. When you come up with a budget that works, you’re finding the money to help the client figure out what’s real and what’s perceived. 

It’s your turn to uncover spending pain points. The steps below will help you ask how a prospect or prospect couple feel about spending. You will ask where they aren’t spending wisely, identify spending areas that do and don’t bring them joy, help your prospects uncover the joy they don’t know they have, and bring prospects with cold feet back to you.

When you’re working with couples, more often than not, one person in the relationship is the spender, and one person is the saver. In this relationship, often the couple has a lot of stress, bickering with each other about what to do with their money. Sometimes both people are savers. The two savers can also be a challenge for you, the advisor, because they don’t want to move any money. Then there’s the couple where both people are spenders. The two spenders don’t have any money to move.

In all three of these scenarios, your goal is to help the prospects uncover their spending pain points. In other words, you want to help them identify their spending or saving stress. In this section, you’re going to learn how to show the prospects that if they work with you, the financial advisor, their pain goes away. You want to bridge that gap between the couple because they are rarely going to see eye-to-eye on things. To do that, you want to identify that there’s a stress, and then let them know that they’re going to be okay. 

It’s your turn to bridge the marital-stress gap. The steps below will help you identify the savers and the spenders in the relationship and identify the financial stress of two diligent savers, two diligent spenders, and one spender and one saver.

Most advisors struggle with this stuff. They do fact finders, and just use the “hope and pray method” to get people to save with them. Then the prospects don’t show up for the close. If that has been you, this budget solution is going to be one great leap in the direction of solving that problem for you. When you learn how to deliver the budget solution in this way, you’re going to be able more easily to get the prospect or couple to show up for the close and sign those papers. 

The last step is to talk to your prospects about what they can do with their money on a quarterly basis. The goal, of course, is to help them decide to save their money with you.