Foreign.

Welcome to Ditch the Suits Podcast where we share insights nobody in the financial services industry wants you to know about.

We're here to help you get the most from your money in life.

So buckle up and welcome to Ditch the Suits.

So we're picking up where we left off with Jeff Chase, our vp, our senior VP of financial planning services.

And we've been talking about really, how do you identify a so called financial advisor over really the real deal?

So when you talk to somebody and say, I got a guy or you meet somebody at a party and they say, you know, I can be your guy or your Gail or whatever, and this is what I do, how do you know they're the real deal?

And how do you know they're not just selling you a bunch of fluff?

I think it's really important.

Why I wanted Jeff to join us is that if you understand what it takes to be a good financial advisor or what we think it takes to be a good financial advisor, the way that we work with our people to develop them.

If your financial advisor is not developing as a person and as a professional, how can they possibly be there to guide you to develop as a person and as a family?

Because that's really a lot of what financial planning is, is helping families make good decisions.

And so, you know, it's one of those things where it can't be just do as I say, not as I do.

You know, you really, if you're taking life advice from somebody and making, having somebody influence, shaping these decisions, you really want to know that you're working with somebody who is striving themselves to be better for something other than just money.

And so I think that this app, this series is going to help people, our listeners kind of have a better idea of what to look for, even subconsciously.

Like, I want somebody that sounds like that.

I want somebody who believes in those things type of stuff.

And so we've got a four part miniseries.

We've done episode one.

We're moving into episode two.

We left off with a cliffhanger off of episode one.

So we're going to get into really what Jeff thinks a little bit more and get into a little bit more of his experience and some of the things that, that he's done through the years today.

But before we do, Steve, I think we've got some intros.

Make sure everybody knows where they are today.

Yeah.

Welcome to Digital Suits Podcast.

My name is Steve Campbell.

I serve as a senior marketing director at Seed Planning Group.

Guy you just heard from Travis Moss is our Chief Executive Officer.

For those that don't know, Seed is a fee only financial planning firm.

So this show is all about us bringing our collective experience of what we do every day to help empower you to get the most from your money in life.

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And Jeff, one of the things that we had left as a teaser in episode one was a question that we want to lead off because I think it's going to be pretty telling.

What is one thing that Jeff Chase would change about the industry?

Yeah, so the one thing I change about the industry is really the, I think this, this goes without probably not a surprise, right?

I would change the sales aspect of it.

And really the conflicts of interest that exist in financial planning.

Financial planners should not be pressured to sell products.

That is, that should not be part of what a financial planner's responsibilities are.

There's nothing wrong with sales, Right.

I just don't think sales should be part of the responsibilities of a financial planner.

And clients shouldn't have to wonder either, right.

When they're sitting across the table from us, they shouldn't have to sit there and wonder, you know, is what this guy's telling me right now, is that really what's in my best interest or is he just trying to sell me something?

Right.

And I'll tell you, because I have experience in that world, people can feel that.

Right.

And that's something that we've done here at Seed, is we've eliminated that conflict of interest.

You know, we can certainly expand on that a little bit more.

And I know you asked me for one thing, but I'll give you another.

Another thing that I just can't stand about the industry in general is, is this kind of the stuffiness, right.

Of like, oh, you're going to see a financial advisor.

It doesn't have to be that way.

Right.

We're on a podcast right now called Ditch the suits.

You see us sitting here in quarter zips.

We're not sitting here in suits.

And, you know, everything is comfortable, it's relaxed.

When you come in and meet with us, the end of the day, we're all just people.

Right?

We just do financial planning for a living.

That's it.

Yeah.

There's this idea within the industry, and I've heard people talk about it before, that, you know, in order to give good advice.

So let's say that you're a client with $5 million.

Their perception is in order to give good advice to a client with $5 million, somebody has to have $5 million.

And I don't think that everybody who has $5 million has had the same life experience.

We have $5 million.

So if you make $5 million selling products to people, and I made $5 million being an entrepreneur, we do not have anything in common.

The way you look at your $5 million and the way I look at my $5 million are you're faking it.

Right?

It's just you're being dishonest.

It's not true.

So the goal with a financial planner really ought to be, how do I just help people understand how the game works so that they can make good decisions and how can I help understand what their values are so that when they're making a decision that's contrary to.

To what they've told us, you know, is their ultimate objective, I can kind of slap their hand and say, no, that's not what you were trying to do.

Remember, you were trying to do this over here.

If you do that, it's going to derail you.

Not that you can't do it because it's your life and your money, but that's going to get you maybe not where you want it to be.

Absolutely, yeah.

There was one thing you said back in the first episode, and I.

Let me see what, I wrote it down.

You said in college you took these classes on financial planning and then you said what they thought was financial planning.

Talk about that more.

What's happening at the college level?

And this isn't.

We're not going to pick on whatever college it is, because I've.

I actually think that this happens.

A lot of kids that I've interviewed coming out of school have a misconception on what financial planning actually is.

And they've taken classes.

Now, certainly those classes have given them kind of a leg up because they've got some basic knowledge like mutual funds and cash flow analysis and stuff like that.

But there seems to be A disconnect with how the industry works.

The college might be accurate in an ideal world, what it should be like.

But, and I'm not, you know, I'm just speculating.

But in the real world, what it's actually like, the two things, like there's no, there's.

There's a very limited connection or spotty connection at best.

So talk about what you meant, you know, by that.

You know, like, just explain that experience to us.

Yeah.

And I guess partly what I said, I don't really necessarily mean it in a, in a negative way.

Kind of like what you were just saying.

Some of it was behavioral finance based, which I actually thought was pretty cool.

That was actually very helpful information.

But a lot of it was, you know, they would talk about mutual funds or cash flow type of analysis or life insurance or hey, these are some things when someone goes to retire that you're going to have to think about.

Right.

So it was, it was very, very high level or very surface level.

When I say what they thought was financial planning, when I actually got into it, I guess originally when I went into my first role, it was nothing like that.

It was all just go sell this annuity, go sell this life insurance.

It'll be an asset gatherer.

Right?

Yeah.

And now as I have progressed into the role here, it's just a lot more deep.

There's a lot more to it than, you know, here's some basic information about what financial planning is.

Right.

There's so much more to it.

And I think that's the beauty of it too.

Right.

That's one of the things I love about financial planning is there isn't redundancy.

I hate redundancy in general.

Right.

If I have to do the same thing over and over and over again, not real fun.

Right.

So the, the variety that you see from clients, it's always something new.

In general, we're doing the same thing.

Right.

We're doing financial planning, but everyone's situation is different.

So that's one of the things I really love about it.

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Yeah, I Think where I was going to with the school stuff is you don't come right out of school and all of a sudden start telling somebody 35 years older than you what to do and that you know life better than they do.

Right.

You know, and when we're talking about money and stuff like that, it's not whether or not you have as much money as them, it's whether or not you understand and you have perspective and you have empathy and, and you listen and you can help prioritize and you can help them weigh decisions because most people we work with have the ability to make the right decisions.

When you go out and you Google for financial planning advice and you say, can I do this?

Or what's this?

Or how's the rules work?

Everything is so complicated.

And the way that search engines work anymore, you don't know if you're getting good information or bad information.

So the role, a lot of times a good financial planner, even from the right out of school, is, you know, learning how to help people sort through problems, you know, or sort through challenges or not understand where to start in a calculation, you know, or run the software so people can see how it actually looks in real life, you know, that type of thing.

I think that there's.

And when you come out of college, because we've had people come right out of financial planning programs before, there seems to be a little bit of friction there because, well, I have a degree in this and it's like.

But your degree, although it gave you knowledge, is not really applicable to anybody you're going to be sitting down in front of.

That's not how the real world works.

People's lives are messy and their decisions are not always rational or they're rational based on their circumstances and they would be irrational based on anybody else's circumstances.

And so you have to be careful about projecting guilt on people and all those other things because they're not doing it the way the book said, you know, and to me, that, that's a big, that's a big issue for, for anybody working with a planner is how well are they able to kind of adapt and learn and develop and like we talked about in the last episode, personally and professionally, consistently be developing so that they can lead you better.

Steve, do you want to get in on this?

Yeah, so.

So we've been talking a lot about so called financial advisor.

How do you recognize the real deal?

Jeff, help somebody say financial planner or wealth manager.

What does that mean to you?

What do those terms really mean?

Yeah, so I think you know, when, when you think about a financial planner or wealth manager, right?

At the end of the day, all you are, is you're a guide on somebody's journey, right?

And, and you're, you're there to help them to figure out where they are now, help them think through where they want to be, right?

So that goes kind of back to what you were just saying, Travis, about everything isn't black and white.

You got to understand how to communicate and help people to get to the point where they can recognize, okay, you know, here's really where I want to go, right?

And then we come in and we're able to put together, you know, the scope of work that we're able to do for people is unlocking that for them.

That's what a financial planner or wealth manager is, right?

Is you're able to guide somebody on their journey, make things understandable for them, and maybe take things off their plate.

I mean, Travis, you had just kind of alluded to it.

A lot of our clients who come in, they have the capability to do a lot of these things on their own, or they have been for a long time sometimes, right?

They'll come in and for the last 20 or 30 years, they've been doing this on their own.

But what happens a lot of times is when they get to, let's say, retirement, right?

Things might change.

They may say, you know what, I don't really want to do this anymore, right.

I don't want the responsibility or the time commitment of handling the day to day.

Or there could be other things that are now involved in their lives, right?

Maybe they're heading into retirement and, you know, tax planning is becoming very prevalent and they just don't know where to start, right?

So that's where we come in and we can really help them to, to improve their lives in that way.

So that's what I would say a financial planner or a wealth manager really is outside of that, Steve, at the end of the day, whether you're a financial planner or you're a wealth manager, we have a duty, right, to act in people's best interest.

It just so happens to be with their financial situation.

That's our job, Right?

That's what a financial planner is.

Yeah.

And I think, you know, there's a lot of people who will say they're a financial planner, financial advisor, do financial planning, and to them it's a job.

It's the way that they get paid.

And I've worked with people like this before.

It's an honor for you to work with me.

And this is why you pay me what you pay me regardless of the work product.

You know, when you think about society today and you think about a lot of the challenges that we have, you know, like, there's this sense of entitlement everywhere, and it permeates even into the financial industry to, you know, I'm a big deal.

Look at all these clients I work with, all these assets I manage or how much I get paid.

You know, it's.

It's a.

You should be honored to work with me.

So you're going to pay xyz and.

And there's very little that's being done at the firm levels to say, well, what was.

What was the product provided to the actual client for the cost of the goods actually sold?

And it.

There's zero.

The way that the industry measures quality is how many new assets did you bring in last year?

As if being a good salesperson is the only things that matters.

And they said, well, you know, if they're bringing in more assets, it must be because they're doing a really good job with the other assets.

Yeah.

Well, Ponzi schemes, you know, bring in tons and tons of assets because people are good at selling it, not because there's any results, you know, because if you did due diligence, there's no results.

People are just really, really good at selling an idea to somebody.

And so they get, you know, they get into the Ponzi scheme thing.

So, you know, it's.

There just.

There is a lot more to it, I think, than just this person's license and they work at a firm and whatever.

You know, I think that the whole quality and the desire to make sure that if you're paying us $10,000, that you're getting $10,000 of value and we can actually point to it and say, here's where that value is.

I think that that is so important.

Yeah.

And that should be transparent too, right?

I mean, that you should be able to see it.

Yeah.

You should be able to see the benefit and the pay.

Yeah, yeah.

And think about it.

When.

When clients come in and we do.

We do a proposal for them for services.

That's exactly what we do.

Right.

Here's what I heard from you.

Here's what we're going to do for you.

Here's what it costs, period.

Right.

Number one argument with the healthcare industry, Right.

You don't know what anything costs.

You can't shop.

Well, the financial industry is almost exactly like that.

You know, if you actually saw how all the Numbers get carved up in the background.

Most people think when they go and they meet with somebody that they are getting paid a salary by whatever the company on the door is.

And the vast majority of advisors have some kind of commission orientation to it or asset gathering, compensation structure, you know, and they're simply getting rated on how much new assets they bring into the company or how much new product they sell versus how much better of a planner they are from one year to another.

And I think that that's the difference between a financial planner and a wealth manager.

Right.

In our lexicon.

So I didn't ask you about this or Steve didn't ask you about, you know, at Seed, how do you see this just in general, but in, in our company, there is a big difference between a financial planner and a wealth manager.

And as far as skill development, it's not a 10 year issue, it's a skill development issue.

And in a lot of firms it's a tenure issue.

That's right, yep.

Our wealth managers have basically, you know, they've come to the point in their career where they can handle most situations.

Right.

And they've also tried to not just the complex situations, but most of them have kind of specialized almost in an area.

Right.

They become a subject matter expert in a certain area.

We just had Jess on or you just had Jess on a couple weeks ago.

Right.

When it comes to estate planning, she's kind of our in house expert in estate planning.

Right.

That's where her background is.

She's passionate about it.

You know, she's going down the line now and, you know, educate herself even more in those areas and others.

And that's really when, you know, clients come in and they have very complex situations, they need that expertise.

That's where a wealth manager comes in.

It's not that a financial planner can't do it.

Right.

Our financial planners, I'd put them up against pretty much every anybody, but it's just for those very complex situations, the wealth managers are really, they just have the expertise to handle them.

Gotcha.

So let's talk about then.

I'm sure you've got some war stories.

Let's share with our listeners some fun war stories about experiences that people have had.

Because when I was part of onboarding new clients, which I'm not anymore, but when I was a part of the onboarding process with new clients, we would get people all the time that would come in and go, you know, I work with a planner and I'm here because I need somebody to do my retirement plan.

For me.

And I'm like, well, what kind of financial planner do you work with that doesn't do a retirement planner?

They'd say something like, yeah, I have a financial planner.

He did my retirement plan, but he doesn't do anything about college planning or, you know, helping me understand my tax withholdings or anything like this.

And it's like, what kind of financial planner do you have?

Like, I'm kind of thinking financial planning is as you go in with a financial question and they can answer it, they don't say, well, go talk to some other professional.

I don't touch that.

You know, I'm like, with.

With the college planning, a lot of times they go in and say, how do I say for college?

Well, we don't do that.

We just do the retirement plan.

The reason is, is because in a lot of states, when you estate 529 plan, the advisor can't get paid.

So it's like one of them things like, I don't do that because I don't get paid.

I don't do Social Security because Social Security won't write a check to me.

You know what I mean?

And it's like, okay, well then you're not really a financial planner.

You're a product salesperson.

And you'll give enough advice around the sale of the product.

So I would love, you know, to take next 10 minutes or so and like, or five minutes, or however many stories you can share with us and like, what are some real life experiences where you had some people come in that are like, man, I got this covered.

And you're just looking at going, oh, really?

How's that work?

We had a client recently who came in, you know, he talked a lot about diversification, right?

That was like his buzzword in our opener.

He's like, yeah, well diversified.

You know, I've got multiple different advisors, multiple different companies, all these different products.

Yeah, I got mutual funds, I got stocks.

So, you know, we get into it, right?

Our.

Our opening meetings with clients usually take a while.

I mean, they could be two hours, right?

Depending on what's going on.

He's got a ton of different accounts, right?

There ended up being 21 different different accounts, 17 different companies, two different advisors, right?

So again, he's talking about diversification quite a bit.

And part of that, you know, not that we're giving advice in that opening meeting, but part of it is there's an artwork to it, right?

Of educating them along the way as you're having a conversation around, you know, okay, maybe Maybe this isn't the best way to think about this.

Right.

Let me educate you on what diversification actually means in a nice and respectable, you know, respectful way during the conversation.

But, you know, he had mutual funds, he had stocks, he had a ton of annuities, ton of different types of annuities.

He had life insurance.

He was retired and still had disability insurance.

There was a lot going on there.

There's all the usual suspects.

I call them collectors.

He's a collector.

He's.

Exactly.

So he was collecting.

It was product overload, which is what we see with a lot of people.

Right.

I would say the common issues.

Just to go off on a side tangent, common issues that we see a lot are misaligned goals, you know, people not understanding what they actually own and why tons of products.

And then, of course, not knowing what you don't know.

Right.

But he had, you know, annuity.

He had an.

He had an annuity where there was an IRA inside of an annuity with no rider on it at all.

So it was just kind of sitting.

Nothing.

No guaranteed death benefit, no income benefit, no nothing.

Don't even know how I got through.

The really dumbly, say, double tax.

The double tax benefits of an annuity inside an IRA is like, no, once.

Once you get the tax benefits of the ira, you don't get double.

Correct.

Correct.

So that, you know, that was sitting in there.

He had an indexed annuity that he was like, yep.

You know, markets are, you know, markets are volatile.

Right.

I've got downside protection.

And, you know, as we go through it, he lost, like, you know, he.

He ended up giving up, like, 48% return.

Right.

Not that it's about returns, but that was part of the education.

Right?

Okay, let me unpack this for you and help you to understand exactly what this is.

He's like, well, there's no fee on that annuity.

I'm like, no, no, there's a fee.

You have 48% fee actually on that thing.

Yeah.

And then, you know, just a bunch of.

Just a conglomeration of products.

Right.

With no real coordination happening there.

So really, what we were able to do for him was to help him understand, you know, first and foremost, the benefit of what he owned or first and foremost, what he owned.

Right.

Understand what you own, what your fees are, why you're paying the fees.

Second of all, help them to get, you know, organized.

Which one of those accounts are actually serving a purpose for him, and what is that purpose?

And then once we were able to get organized, that's where we were to get it, we were able to get into some of the real meaningful planning for him.

He had not, in all the time that we had talked, we're talking about a high net worth individual, hadn't talked about taxes one single time.

All this other stuff really not even an issue in his life.

He would have been fine.

He could have kept it.

He would have been fine.

Right.

But when we were able to show him the impact of actually doing proactive tax planning for what his situation was, um, I mean, mind blowing amount of, of, of value that we were able to provide for him and that's really where the reward is on our end, right?

Where you feel, you feel so great that you're able to actually help somebody in that way.

Um, so that was, that was a big win for us just being able to kind of educate him and help him to, to get things in a better spot.

For anybody listening who doesn't, who, who has been told there's no fee or thinks there's no fee on, on anything that they have in there.

If you have an account with a financial company or an account that's provided by an annuity or something, right?

You, the sales job that's been done on you for you to believe that there's no fee is shocking.

You know, even in a brokerage account, oh, there's no fee.

I put my money in there.

They're making a spread off your cash.

There's all kinds of other stuff they could be doing behind the scenes.

There is no such thing as a free lunch.

If everything's free, nobody can afford to be in business.

This isn't social media, right?

You don't log into your Schwab account and see a bunch of advertisements for, you know, Walmart and stuff like that.

They're not going to pay to, to advertise to you.

They're.

They make money off your money one way or another.

There is no free lunch.

And the sales job that has been done to people and the, you know, I think the abuse that has happened is just ridiculous.

Where people truly believe there's no fees on these products.

It's like there's this, New York did this years ago.

New York has had budget problems for a long time.

So years ago they came out and they said everybody's gonna get a new license plate.

And it, you know, you had to pay 60 bucks for your new license plate or something like that.

And they're like, we didn't raise taxes this year.

Yeah, but you required me to pay $60 for a new License plate.

That's a tax.

I don't have an option.

I have to pay it if I'm going to drive in New York, right?

I'm required to buy that.

That's a tax.

You know, call it a fee, call it whatever you want.

You're forcing me to give money, more money over to the government.

So that's taxation through a different name.

Fees are the same way.

If I tell you, look, I'm not going to charge you any fees, Jeff, because I really like you and, you know, I'm just a good guy, I'm not gonna charge you any fees, but I'm gonna put you in this product.

And this product is also gonna guarantee that you can't lose any money.

And you say, okay, so what's the catch?

Well, the catch is you can only make up to 6% a year.

And how do I make that 6%?

That 6% is indexed to the market.

So basically, we buy you a market, an option that looks.

They don't even buy you anything.

Basically, we just track an index based on the price movements.

And if that price goes up, we give you a percentage of that price movement up to a cap.

These companies are not stupid.

It's Vegas.

The house is winning almost every time.

They know what the odds are.

They are making so much money off of those products, it's ridiculous.

Because when you start to do the math, the fee is the fact that the market made 15% last year and you got 3.

That's the fee.

You got it 12%.

Somebody kept the other 12%.

You didn't need to pay for that.

You could have just bought a CD someplace.

And yes, CDs are not free either.

When you give your money to the bank, the reason why the bank gives one bank gives you four and one bank gives you a four and a half is because one bank's making a half percent more than the other bank.

Right?

That's your fee.

It's your opportunity cost.

It's taxation through another name.

I did have, Jeff, you and I work hand in hand as part of our onboarding team in the way that we for call ins and people that reach out to us, we do have a process to give clients a great experience.

And I think with what Travis was asking about this real life experience, what's interesting, we have a couple of camps.

When they reach out to us, referrals that are all in, they're ready to jump right in.

They're excited about planning.

You have people that we would consider not fits, just unrealistic expectations, not Wanting to pay for planning, whatever it is, we deem them as a not fit.

Then you have kind of skeptics or they're not quite sure.

And I have seen you, I've seen Jess, I've seen our other planners take people that have reached out to us to say, I need help.

You meet with them, you line up a proposal of services and they go, I'm not sure I really need all of these things.

And then they sign up for planning and they get into a couple of meetings with us.

I love when you guys call me after these meetings and say, that was incredible.

We were able to help them with this, in this, in this.

And they didn't even realize that they weren't getting these things.

Can you just kind of speak to the excitement about planning with some of these real life experiences when people think they got things covered, but from a planner or wealth manager's perspective, how you're able to show them things that they're not even aware that they could be taking advantage of.

Because I think that's one of the most exciting things about the job.

Yeah, absolutely, it is.

And that goes back to not knowing what you don't know.

Right.

It's not anyone's fault.

How would they know that?

Right.

They've had a career in another field for however many years.

But a lot of times that does happen.

People come in and they, they think they have it figured out.

They're like, hey, I'm just looking for a spot check on this one thing.

And then we're able to kind of plant that seed of, hey, have you thought about this, this and this?

And then as we get into planning normally, right.

And this is definitely the majority of the time we'll get to the end of planning.

And they're like, I didn't think that this was going to be that, you know, enlightening for me, right.

Of now.

I understand what you were talking about four months ago when we were starting this initial planning process about whatever it is.

A lot of times for the most of the clients who we meet with, a lot of that deals with tax planning.

Right.

And we're able to really dig in with them and help them there.

But I think there's some other areas as well where that does come into play.

One of the big ones is estate planning.

Right.

And Jess talked about that quite a bit in her episode there.

But those two areas seem to be places where clients are kind of either misinformed, uninformed, or they're just kind of, they don't even know that there's an opportunity there that can be had.

So that is absolutely one of the most exciting parts of our job is being able to to have that impact on their lives and have them actually recognize it and think back to when we first brought it up to them.

So yeah, thanks for checking out Ditch the Suits.

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