EP200423 RichOnPlanning - PLANNING MATTERS - The Value Of An Advisor W Frank Maselli

If you fail to plan, plan to fail.

How do you want your future to look? We want you to plan for success. Welcome to Planning Matters Radio. And welcome into another edition of Rich on Planning, Planning Matters Radio. I am Peter Rashan, founder and CEO of Rashan Planning, Southern Wake County and Central North Carolina's resource for a common sense approach to planning for your financial future.

Certainly a lot of craziness right now in the markets and turmoil in people's retirement accounts and progress. We are here to help and assist if you need any kind of perspective, guidance, opinion, a review, an analysis of your financial and retirement planning or retirement accounts. Pick up the phone. Feel free to be in touch. Give us a call. We can talk over the phone.

We can set up a virtual meeting and review and we are here to help. 919-300-5886. That number again, 919-300-5886. Or you can go online, richonplanning.com.

Button right at the top of the website to request a time and you can schedule it at your convenience for a virtual review. 919-300-5886 or richonplanning.com. We are now privileged to be joined by a very special guest. He is Frank Masele of the Masele Group, former US Army officer and three decade veteran of the financial services industry. Frank has been a coach and mentor to many financial advisors across the country. And Frank, really a pretty dramatic here recently, but a real change in the atmosphere and the way that people look at financial advisors is going on. Don't you believe? Oh, I absolutely believe that.

And it's kind of a mixed bag. I mean, on one hand, we've seen a massive market decline, which has just basically evaporated trillions of dollars of wealth in a very, very short period of time. But on the other hand, and I don't think people blame advisors for that. Absolutely not. But if anything, what we've seen is people are saying, my God, I really do need professional help.

I mean, this is not, you know, this is not a game. We are in a financial environment where amateurs get eaten alive. And the only hope that people have of protecting themselves is to get some sort of professional guidance and to make sure that they are properly positioned. Now, look, nobody predicted this downturn, you know, the COVID virus, nobody predicted any of that from, you know, a financial standpoint, certainly. But proper financial guidance would have mitigated and prevented a lot of hardship. And I think advisors are being looked at as, oh, my God, we need you now.

So it's kind of exciting in a way. Frank, in any environment, or maybe more myopic in this environment, what do you feel is the true value of a financial advisor and a relationship with a financial advisor? Well, you know, the value of an advisor has always been a personal connection with a human being who can empathize and who can understand and who can listen to you.

But that value has been highlighted even more, because so many people recently have turned to automated systems for managing their money. And, you know, like I say to clients all the time, everybody can be Columbus when the seas are calm. Okay. And for the last 11 years, we've had a historical market.

And people think that, you know, my gosh, this is going to go on forever. And we can just keep doing what we're doing. And we don't need an advisor to guide us. But when the storm comes, you need a captain on the bridge of that ship.

Okay. And, and so consequently, I think what what a value is for an advisor is a personal connection, and somebody who stands on the bridge of the ship. And first of all, looks out for danger, because frankly, any advisor worth their salt was probably guiding clients to say, you know what, this market doesn't go up forever. Let's protect ourselves to some degree. Let's take some chips off the table.

Let's be a little more cautious, or at least let's be forward looking. So the value of a professional advisor, particularly over an algorithm or a computer program of some kind, is extraordinary and unprecedented and unequal. You cannot duplicate what a professional advisor can do. As we are seeing with robo advisors today, then you think that are these greater than less than equal to that relationship with a real person, a real advisor? Absolutely greater.

I mean, robo has failed. You know, algorithms respond on data. And basically just trading data. And then I don't want to get into the complexities of what's going on with the market trading process.

But that's not human beings anymore. None of the volume on the New Yorker, the NASDAQ is human beings trading. Okay, all of that volume, I would say 95% of that volume is algorithms trading. And algorithms purely trade not on the underlying value, but on the movements on the trade themselves. So you don't have any wisdom in there.

You don't have anybody making value judgments. All you have is computers reacting to trading data, which is why you see volatility like we've never even imagined in our lifetimes. That's what's causing it. So yeah, I think right now with all this computer stuff, it's proven that it doesn't work.

Well, let me reverse that. It's proven that it only works when things are calm. And it's proven that it only works in a rising bull market. But when the spaghetti hits the fan, you don't want an algorithm in your corner.

You want a human being. Frank, despite the fact that we see maybe the value of that real financial advisor now more than ever, or in times like these, the financial advisor profession seems to be in trouble. How do you reconcile those two things? I think segments of the profession are in cyclical trouble in the sense that there are many pieces to the financial advisory profession, as you know. There are many, many people who call themselves financial advisors who come from very different backgrounds, very different training.

It's kind of a mixed bag out there. So I think there will always be some segments of the financial advisor population that does better than others. One that's extremely popular right now and has been for a while and will probably accelerate is the independent advisor. I think independent advisor, I think the future of the industry is very much toward the independent practitioner, somebody who doesn't have any master controller over them telling them what to do, somebody who works purely for the benefit of their clients. And you know, it's just a much, much better model for most clients, I would think. And today, an advisor working in their garage can do anything that an advisor working on Wall Street can do.

The technology has completely leveled the playing field. So I think independents are doing very, very well. How is a good advisor currently, or how are the good advisors of the future adapting to this environment? What are they doing? I think the first thing they're doing is they're being in touch with their people. They're talking to their people. They're not hiding under the desk.

They're not, you know, bunkering death on for the storm. They are out there communicating. They're doing webinars. They're doing a lot of online stuff. They're in front of their clients.

That's number one. They're holding hands and they're communicating, which is the most important thing advisors can do. The second thing they're doing is they're, you know, they're looking judiciously at the future and saying, okay, when the storm is over, because every storm ends.

I mean, you know that. We've been around a long time and we've seen a lot of crazy things. I've been in this business a long, long time and I've seen storms that looked like it was the end of the world and it wasn't.

And it never is. Okay, so the best advisors are looking forward and saying, how do we come back? How do we take advantage of the future? Because the future is actually bright and it's very hard to say that and it's very hard to see that when you're in the middle of the storm, which is where we are right now.

So you kind of have to take it on faith. I'm taking it on faith and experience, but I'm going to tell you the future is extremely bright for investors and I think the best advisors are looking forward saying, okay, what's our next move? How do we preserve your wealth and how do we continue to grow? How do different generations need to think about planning and how are they different in their need for the advice they receive?

Well, that's a great question, Peter. And right now, if you take a good look demographically at the financial landscape from a client perspective, you have five generations of people who are investing their money and each one of those generations has very specific and somewhat different needs. If you take the senior population and you throw in the baby boomers, the aging baby boomers, their need is protection. Their need is some form of guaranteed protected income in retirement.

Obviously, they just took a hit in their portfolios, so the need for protection is even greater for them and many, many tools out there that enable that form of protection. So that's number one. But as you move younger in the population, you know, the Gen Xers, the millennials who are coming on very strong, these are two very large populations of people who need to grow. And by the way, they realize very clearly that the government is not going to protect them in retirement and we don't need to get into that discussion today.

It's a very long discussion. But if you ask a hundred Gen Xers who's going to take care of you in retirement and they laugh at you, they say me. I'm the only person who's going to take care of me. Social Security is going to be gone by the time I retire. So these people need growth. They need intelligent growth. They need growth that is somewhat sheltered and protected from these kinds of, you know, volatile markets, but their needs are significantly different than the senior population. And then the youngest people need, you know, first of all, they need education. They need to learn something about money and then they need growth as well. So it's going to be exciting. But you've got generations that are going to live to be a hundred. Think about the financial needs of an entire generation that lives to be a hundred years old.

That's a completely different model than we've ever seen in history. It's very exciting. Frank, the media seems to portray financial advisors in a much different respect than you seem to value them.

Yeah. Well, I mean, certainly I've been one. I've been in this business for decades now. So I have a respect for advisors that goes much deeper in the media. You know, you got to take the media with a grain of salt, but the media portrays advisors as salespeople and those days are pretty much over.

I won't say they're completely over, but they're pretty much over. The best advisors are not salespeople anymore. We haven't been salespeople for a long time. We're here to help people.

I have a model. I call it the financial lifeguard model. My job is to swim out every day into a sea of confusion and disaster and to pull families to safety.

That's my job. It's not about selling products anymore. And those advisors who are still stuck in a sales mentality, they're very few and I don't think they're going to make it for much longer. But yeah, the media misportrays financial advisors and you get these movies like, what was that movie? Wall Street many years ago. Wolf of Wall Street. Wolf of Wall Street.

Oh my God. It's so not that anymore. At least for the bulk of significant professional advisors.

We don't do that stuff. Well, Frank, you've talked about the value of a financial advisor, the need for a good one, the fact that some may disappear. As a consumer, as an investor myself looking around, how do we search for and find a good one to connect with? What should we be looking for?

Well, it's very subjective. I mean, first of all, you can look for credentials. And I would look for that kind of educational background from an advisor. Are they an expert in what they're telling me to do? And that's important.

But the best way to judge an advisor, in my opinion, is by the questions they ask you and the way they listen to you. Okay. And it's an interesting story because many, many years ago, we used to ask clients like two questions.

How much money do you have and how fast can you get it over here? Okay. That was the sales model.

Those days are gone. Now the question process, the due diligence process, the careful vetting process is so much more powerful. It takes weeks, months, in some cases, before an advisor can make a legitimate recommendation to a client. So I judge by the slowness of the movement. And the slower they move, the better they are, probably, because the more thoughtful they are in the deliberative process in understanding you. How much do they take into account your needs? How deep do they dig in understanding you before making a recommendation?

That's the most critical thing, in my opinion. Well, he is a three-decade veteran of the financial services industry, a coach for many financial advisors and for financial organizations across the country, a three-time best-selling author. Frank, if folks want more information, if they want to connect to ask you a few questions, how can they be in touch? Anytime. My website is masellygroup.com. Then they can reach me at frankatmasellygroup or they can call me.

I'm in Raleigh, North Carolina. And I'll give you my office number. Is that okay? Sure. It's 919-329-2723. Wait, let me make sure about that. 919-329-2723.

Yes, that is my number. We don't dial ourselves all that much. I know.

It's crazy, right? Well, Frank, I have seen you speak. I thought you were very good. A lot of value, a lot of inspirational messaging behind what you said. Great humor, very funny presentation.

You had a two-day workshop condensed down to about three hours. And I think you packed in all of the laughs into that time. So certainly appreciated the time here on the program and sharing your wisdom and insight with us too. Well, I appreciate what you do, Peter. It's a very valuable service and I think you're doing a wonderful job. So thank you for the opportunity.

Well, again, it's masellygroup.com. If you would like to connect or get more information. Again, three-time bestselling author of Frank Maselli here with us and we certainly appreciate the time. Frank, we'll talk to you again soon. You got it.

Bye-bye. Well, great interview there. Certainly appreciate Frank Maselli joining us here on the program for another edition of Rich on Planning, Planning Matters Radio. Once again, if you need any help or assistance, guidance, perspective, insight or review and evaluation of your financial and retirement planning or your retirement and investment accounts, pick up the phone.

Feel free to be in touch. Give us a call. 919-300-5886, 919-300-5886. Visit richonplanning.com button right at the top there to schedule at your convenience a virtual review or even just a phone conversation to get things started.

We try to make things easy and convenient for you and we are here to help. 919-300-5886, richonplanning.com. Thanks again for tuning in to another edition of Planning Matters Radio.

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