Ep. 173 – Peace of Mind Wealth Management Process

Are you considering taking that complimentary call and possibly working with us? Here at Peace of Mind, we have a well-curated system from the first meeting we have with a potential client to the actual job of managing their financial retirement plan.

In this episode of the Secure Your Retirement podcast, we take you through our process and the four steps to secure your retirement. Listen in to learn how we conduct a risk assessment on your investments, plus come up with an active retirement financial plan for you.

In this episode, find out:

●     Personalized introduction meeting – a no-obligation meeting checking where you are and if we’re potentially a good fit.

●     The two reasons why we might think you’re not a good fit for us on the first meeting.

●     Personalized planning meeting – putting your information together into a retirement focus financial plan.

●     Things that go into a risk assessment that we conduct during our second meeting.

●     The advantageous aspects of the complimentary personalized planning meeting.

●     Personalized options review – walking you through all the options as to how we can start a working relationship.

●     Personalized monitoring – an ongoing process of actively managing your money accounts and financial plan.

Tweetable Quotes:

●     “We have a process/ system, you either like, or you don’t like it we’re comfortable with that.”– Radon Stancil

●     “If you have investments, we’re going to take a look at what your investments are and essentially do a score as to how risky they are.” – Murs Tariq

Resources:

If you are in or nearing retirement and you want to gain clarity on what questions you should be asking, learn what the biggest retirement myths are, and identify what you can do to achieve peace of mind for your retirement, get started today by requesting our complimentary video course, Four Steps to Secure Your Retirement!

To access the course, simply visit POMWealth.net/podcast.

Here’s the full transcript:

Radon Stancil:	Welcome everyone to our August podcast. We are excited today. This is our Wine Down series, but we actually are talking about a very, I think, important topic, our Peace of Mind Retirement Process. We’re going to break that down for you, but as we do always on our Wine Downs, we always kind of start out here with Morgan telling us what we’re going to have for wine today.
Morgan Dunn:	Today we’re drinking Westmount. It’s a Willamette Valley, Pinot Gris. And if I’m being honest, I’m just going down the list and trying to figure out the best Pinot Gris for the value from the Willamette Valley. So this is the most latest one. It’s good. It’s not my favorite, but it’s good. That’s all I got.
Radon Stancil:	All right. Very good. Well, I will tell you that it tastes pretty good. I like it. I think you are really exploiting this trip you did.
Morgan Dunn:	Well, no, actually what I’m doing is I’m just trying to find the best one for my value and I’m doing it on your dime.
Radon Stancil:	Very good. So, Morgan, you’re our narrator for this. Can you kind of give us our outline for our discussion today?
Morgan Dunn:	Sure. So we’re going to be talking about our process, the Peace of Mind Retirement Process, and the four steps to secure your retirement. So the first one is going to be our personalized introduction meeting. The second one, our personalized planning meeting. The third, our personalized options review. And then finally, personalized monitoring.
Radon Stancil:	All right, let’s get into our first one.
Morgan Dunn:	All right. So first off, once somebody is introduced to us or gets to know us, the first step would be a personalized introduction meeting. What’s that look like?
Radon Stancil:	So I think that’s a very, very important meeting. I’d like to set it up here just to help people appreciate, in our process, sometimes it’s a different based on the financial advisor, but in our process, this is a no obligation. We really do view it as a second opinion. And so the reality is what it looks like is that a person is going to either have prepared prior or they’re going to come in and we are going to create at what we call a financial snapshot. So one of the things that looks like is where you’re at right now today. We also are going to have a conversation around whether or not we think that we potentially, either side, could be a good fit.
	We know, in that meeting, there’s two things happening. We know that the person that comes in and talks to us is looking at us and saying, “Hey, do we think these guys could be the right fit for me?”
	And I’ll be very honest with you looking right back at you and saying, “Do we think that you could be a good fit for what we do?” Because at this point, we only want to work with individuals that it’s a good fit on both sides. But I want to talk a little bit about why we think this meeting is so important. Murs and I talk a lot about GPS. When you put information into a GPS and you think, “I’m going to use this to get to where I want to go,” a lot of times people think, “Oh, the most important thing is I got to put in the addresses to where I’m going.” And the reality is you could put that address in, but if the GPS doesn’t know where you’re at right now, it doesn’t know how to tell you to get there. So knowing where we are at the beginning is really, really important.
	And that financial snapshot really starts to help Murs and I have a conversation about where are we at today? And do we think that we have a potential good plan, a good roadmap, you might want to say, to get us to that future, which the future that we’re planning for is a piece of mind retirement, it’s why we call it the Peace of Mind Retirement Process. And so in that meeting, it’s about 45 minutes, 30 to 45 minutes. It’s a little bit a get to know each other. We know that you’ve got questions for us. We got questions for you. We kind of walk through your goals. We walk through kind of how you see things, what your viewpoint is. And we’re kind of back and forth on that. I always tell people, there’s two reasons why we personally would say that a person’s not a good fit for us.
	There’s two big reasons. One, the person, we believe, is going to run out of money. They’re spending more money than what the plan will sustain. And we can see that pretty quickly. And then the second one is they want us to be riskier than what we want to be. Meaning they want us to buy things that we wouldn’t do. They want us to do options or futures or something weird that we just don’t do. And we’re never going to do it just to be able to get the clients, it’s not going to happen. Anything I’m missing on that, Murs, kind of what we do in that meeting?
Murs Tariq:	No, I think the best way to sum it up is that it’s kind of like a first date and you get to know each other on both sides of the table and decide whether or not you want to go to a second. And sometimes it works out that way. Sometimes we do go to a second visit, which is the personalized planning meeting. And sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes the person across the table wants a different type of strategy or really just needed a couple questions answered. And we part happily if that’s the case. So I think a lot of value in taking the time to sit down for that personalized introduction meeting on both sides of the table.
Radon Stancil:	And one thing I want to say on that real quick too, is that even if we’re not a good fit, I will say that everybody walks out of those meetings with having an experience where they go, “Okay, I feel good about the fact that I’m doing everything right,” or that, “I have a good plan in place,” and there’s nothing we could do to help them. So I always tell people it doesn’t hurt to spend 30 to 45 minutes with us having a conversation.
Morgan Dunn:	Yeah. So at this point, the person has decided that we could be a good fit for them. And we’ve decided that we may be able to add value to their retirement planning. So we move on to the personalized planning meeting. What is that like?
Murs Tariq:	Yeah. So now we’re onto the second date, the personalized planning meeting. And this is where we really start to get into the, if you want to call it the weeds a little bit, about that person’s scenario. So we already have a lot of information about them from the first visit. We know the financial snapshot has been completed. What that entails, on a high level, is assets. It also includes how much they are spending, what their retirement goals are as far as age, as far as income they want in retirement, are they going to have any inheritances? What’s their estate plan look like? Do they have their documents? So we have a lot of information and now we’re ready to put it all together, really into the beginnings of what we call our Retirement Focused Financial Plan. And so our team, before the second visit, is going to do some work and start putting that together.
	And basically it starts as a, “Hey here’s where,” we can call them, “the John family is from where we know them today. They’re 65, they’ve got a certain amount of assets. We’re going to input that all into the software. Here’s what we expect their social security to be. Here’s what we expect their incomes to be. Here’s what they’ve told us as far as how they want to, when they want to retire.” And we start to walk that through throughout this plan.
	The other piece that we do is what we call a risk assessment. So couple things that go into a risk assessment. If you have investments, we’re going to take a look at what your investments are and essentially do a score on them as to how risky they are. I’ll tell you, oftentimes, people don’t realize how much risk they have in their accounts. Sometimes they think they’re in a conservative portfolio or a moderately conservative portfolio, and they don’t realize, “Well, what is my downside risk on that type of portfolio?”
	And when we tell them, when we show them, that it’s 15 or 20%, they’re kind of taken aback, thinking that, “I thought I could only lose 10% in this type of portfolio.” So we do risk assessment on what they currently have. And then the third part of it is that we do have a big risk conversation as to how their personal view of risk. And we do that through a simulation on basically their assets. So there’s a lot of meat that goes into the second visit. Again, it’s kind of building out what we call the retirement financial plan. So it starts a little bit as a rough draft. We start it together, me and Radon, and the clients, and we’re walking through where we are today and where do we want to get to, that GPS thing.
	And then what that shows us is, “Hey, things look okay,” or, “Maybe there are a few bumps in the road that we need to address.” Whether that’s maybe working longer or talking about spending, or maybe everything looks just fine and you can go ahead and retire today. So it’s a very eye opening meeting just to have taken the time to walk through that type of plan. A lot of times people haven’t walked through a plan. They’ve just done a lot of saving and they think they’re going to be fine. But seeing how all these things start to interact once we get close to retirement, is a big part of the deal. So that’s huge, and then also understanding what their current risk is and what their current view of risk is very important.
Radon Stancil:	So we serve a little over 190 families right now and I’m racking my brain, where’d you come up with the John family?
Murs Tariq:	I don’t know. I was trying to come up with a generic, the John family. I don’t know.
Radon Stancil:	At least it’s John Doe.
Murs Tariq:	That’s what it was, is Doe. John Doe. Or I could have said John Smith, but I landed on the John family. So you Johns out there, sorry to-
Radon Stancil:	All right so just want to speak before we move to the next meeting. So one thing Murs said, and I just want to reiterate it, is that it’s eye-opening. I will tell you of all of the meetings. People love it when we… Because what we’ll do is we take that information that we gather in the meeting one. And then in meeting two, we’ve got it in our software and we put it up on the screen. We have a large screen TV that we have in our conference room, we put it up there. And we walk people through and they’ll start asking us, “Well, what if this happens? What if that happens?” And we are able to tweak it right there, live in front of them. And quite honestly, sometimes it is, “What if my spouse dies? What if I decide to retire at age 65, 62, 64, 67?” And we can just plug all those numbers in.
	And people have a lot of fun with that. If you’re not a financial guru where you think, “Oh man, I love to see the spreadsheets,” This is not it. You could be a person who just goes, “I just want to know, will it work? And what’s it going to look like?” And we always show people usually age 90. What will it look like at age 90? And I would say that nine times out of 10, for our families that have been good savers, usually one of them goes, “We need to spend a little bit more money.” And they get a little excited because they’re like, “Oh, you know what? I’m taking another vacation. I’m going to do something a little extra.” And that’s really where it is, because people just can’t visualize it. And this meeting really helps them to visualize it.
Murs Tariq:	And let me add to that as well. So that meeting takes about an hour, where we’ve walked through quite a bit. And what we do at the end of that meeting is we print that out and give that to you. The reason being is we’ve already done the work, so we feel someone should have this. Whether or not we end up working together, that part doesn’t matter, but the work is already been done and the value is already there. So we give it to them. And we also say, “Hey, if there’s things that we didn’t think about in this visit, if some numbers are off, or maybe we didn’t have the accurate social security estimates, or whatever it is, we open it up to if there’s tweaks that need to be made, we’re happy to make those tweaks as well.” So we say, “Take this all home. Think about what we’ve talked about, because we know we’ve talked about quite a bit and then we’ll talk about what the next step is.”
Morgan Dunn:	And that’s still a complimentary visit and you’re receiving so much information that you can, whether you decide to come back or not still work with, and think about. So then if we do decide to come back and get together again, it’s the personalized options review.
Radon Stancil:	So the way we leave that second meeting is we say, “Okay, here’s where we are. We’ve delivered all this information to you. We want you to take it home and think about it.” I always tell people, “You’ll never ever talk to a client. You’ll never talk to Murs, myself, anybody in the office that ever tries to convince you to become a client.” We have a process. We have a system. You either like it or you don’t like it. And we’re okay with that. We’re comfortable with that.
	So basically what happens is at the end of the second visit, we’ve gone through a lot. There’s a lot of taught conversation we’ve had we say, “Take it home, look at what we have discussed. Think about it, write down any questions you have.” Then we come back to this options review. And at this point is when we’re saying, “Okay, we like you guys, we think we would like to work with you,” but we have some questions that we’re trying to figure out.
	Maybe we’re trying to think about how we’re going to start. What accounts do we want to start with? And so in this meeting, we start walking through all the options as to how you could work with us and how we might start the relationship. And a lot of times that comes down to how does it even work? “I’ve got a 401k, how do I get the 401k from where it’s at now to being able for you guys to manage it?” I’ll give you that one, by the way, usually your 401k is through your company. So it could be in a lot of different places, but a famous place for 401ks is Fidelity. So let’s say you got a 401k at Fidelity and you’re thinking, “Hey, I want to work with you guys.” Well, for most of our clients, we use Charles Schwab. So Charles Schwab means we’re going to have to open an IRA account at Charles Schwab and then we’re going to get on the phone and we’re going to call your 401k and tell them that we want to do a rollover of your 401k.
	Now, if you’re still working, as long as you’re over 59 and a half, we can do what’s called an in-service rollover, and you can continue to keep your 401k, continue to fund it, continue to get your match, all that kind of thing. If you’ve retired already and it’s an old 401k, the process pretty much works the same. We call them, we tell them we’re doing a rollover, they’re going to do the rollover there’s no taxes due or anything like that, and it gets it over into the IRA. If you already have IRAs, then basically what we’re doing is opening an account at Charles Schwab, and we’re going to do an electronic transfer from your current IRA over to Charles Schwab. Or if it’s a brokerage account, or anything like that, we’re going to do it that way. So in that meeting, we’re kind of again, are we going to work together? Doing any kind of paperwork, getting all that process started so that we actually have the ability to work with you. Anything I’m missing there Murs?
Murs Tariq:	No, no. I think that’s it. Then we go into implementation.
Radon Stancil:	Yep.
Morgan Dunn:	That’s the personalized monitoring.
Murs Tariq:	That’s right. So now, in the personalized monitoring, that’s kind of an ongoing process. You’ve decided you want to work with us. We’ve come with the plan, we presented that to you, and now we start to implement that plan. So on the investment side of things, we are actively managing the account. That means we are watching it every single day to make sure that we are doing what we tell our clients we’re going to do, which is make a decent rate of return, not lose a bunch of money on the market side. And so we handle that side of things, but as we actively manage the market accounts, we also want to make sure that we’re actively managing the financial plan that we just came up with.
	So part of that is ongoing meetings and conversations. So at the very least we’re seeing clients annually, but I’ll tell you, we see clients more often than that, depending on whatever the situation is. It could be a life event, could be, “Hey, I’m coming up on retirement now. We’ve been working together for five years and now that time is finally coming. I need some extra meetings this year because I really want to make sure that I’m making the right decision. So let’s revamp the plan. Let’s go through that.”
	Or it could be, “Hey, we’ve been retired for five years now and we’ve decided that we would like to,” I tell this story all the time, because it is true, “sell our house, buy an RV, and travel the U.S. for the next 10 years. Can we do that?” So that, going back to the GPS that Radon was talking about, that is a hard left turn on this GPS. And now we got to course correct, and make sure that the plan is still viable with this new idea. So we have meetings that are kind of fun-based on that side of let’s dream a little bit. We have meetings that are, “Hey, how are things going? How are the accounts doing?” and everything like that. So it’s an ongoing thing.
	On top of that every Monday, Radon and I, we put out a video that we send to all clients and people that are interested in what we do, we do a market update. So you hear from us every single Monday as part of that monitoring. And then we’re always trying to do some educational events here and there as well to make sure that you’re staying in the loop as far as various retirement topics on top of what we do here at the podcast. So the monitoring, once you understood what we bring to the table and you’ve decided you want to work with us, from there we get to go down this path of let’s keep things rolling. Let’s keep things working smooth. And if there are issues, let’s address those issues and that’s how we do it.
Radon Stancil:	And I think also just to keep in mind that a part of that process too, is from all of our clients, we offer tax planning, tax strategy. For many of our clients, we do their actual tax returns for them. In addition to that, estate planning, Medicare planning, long-term care planning. So all of that is being done throughout the year to make sure that you don’t have to worry about any aspect of your overall retirement plan.
	And there’s a lot here. We just will to take 15, 20 minutes and just kind of say, “Hey, we just want you to understand the basics of the process.” And so that’s why we laid this out. We went through all these steps, all four of them, with some detail below them. If you’re listening to it and you’re thinking, “Wait a minute, what was step two? What was step three?” Go to our website, which is pomwealth.net. Go to the blog page. We have a blog article written on this particular topic and it’ll lay it all out. Step one, step two, step three, with all the details of what we just talked about.
	Thank you very much for listening. Thank you very much, Morgan, for narrating for us and making sure that we stay on track. We enjoyed this episode very much. So please have a good week. We’ll talk to you next Monday.