Financial Planning Working more effectively with your wealth advisor at any age

Slattery says the first step is learning to be transparent with your wealth advisor—even about topics you might not have thought were relevant.

“Whatever’s keeping you up at night is what we want to know because that’s what will help us adjust, add value to, and ultimately optimize your plan,” says Slattery. “We don’t necessarily want the intimate details. All we need is a general idea of the big concerns and goals occupying your time. Once we know that, we can identify where and how they fall into one of these four major categories for planning needs.”

1. Your personal history with money – Open and honest discussion about both financial missteps and money management successes gives your wealth advisor a more robust understanding of your risk tolerance and decision-making processes—enabling them to adapt your plan to current and foreseeable circumstances.

2. Your family dynamics – Whether inheriting money or providing financial support to parents and children, family matters. Talking out details of preexisting wills and trusts of which you’re a beneficiary, or discussing how best to draw up trusts where you’ll be the grantor, expands considerations of your finances from the individual to the collective in a future-oriented way.

3. Your personal goals – At first glance, it might not be immediately obvious how personal wish-list items like running a marathon in all 50 states or captaining a sailboat from Miami are important for optimizing your wealth planning. But these goals often have a direct impact on structuring your personal finances, and sharing them can provide your advisor with crucial insights that go beyond the quantitative. A conversation about your efforts to accomplish a life-long dream can give your advisor a better understanding of how you plan for big life moments or your attitude toward key planning topics like health and wellness.

4. Your long-term care plans and health history – The rising cost of healthcare and the importance of insurance, long-term care, and estate planning keep more than a few people up at night. Making space to discuss these topics enables your advisor or strategist to make sure long-term healthcare considerations are addressed and adjustments are made as necessary. And regardless of your age, sharing any concerns about potential hereditary issues helps your advisor structure your finances to account for your and your heirs’ current and future health.

While the majority of the information your advisor needs to know falls into one of these categories, determining how you prioritize the four—and discussing the aspect of your life that slot into them in an open, time-efficient way—can sometimes be tricky.

“Our listening card system simplifies the process with conversational prompts that help identify and sort core concerns into each category,” says Slattery. “Each of the 14 cards is a prompt that helps clarify and prioritize planning considerations within that four-point financial context—all while giving you the space and time to talk through issues and helping ensure that we advise based on your priorities.“

Beyond their specific circumstances, goals, and concerns, one shared consideration that often influences financial planning for high-net-worth individuals is their age and stage in life. Understanding these generational differences can often help alleviate personal anxieties.

“In your 30s, it can be all too easy to worry that one or two investment missteps you’ve made are responsible for leaving you with a lack of personal financial flexibility—a mindset that could make opening up to your advisor about that concern difficult,” says Slattery. “But your reserve about discussing what you think is a personal issue can disappear if you realize that a lot of your peers have the same concern.”

Likewise, if someone in their 40s or 50s recontextualizes what they consider a personal problem of balancing financial support for parents and children as a common dilemma of the “sandwich generation,” it can become easier to discuss and effectively address with their wealth advisor. Slattery outlines common concerns like these for each generation:

• Baby boomers: Wealth transfer efficiency and estate planning, optimizing long-term healthcare structures
• Generation X: Balancing parental and child support, optimizing retirement plans
• Millennials: Debt management, homeownership, economic volatility, selecting effective investment strategies
• Generation Z: Job market stability, cost of living, early-stage investing, long-term goal setting

Considering these and other concerns in an intergenerational context with your wealth advisor can also aid estate planning. For example, a trust structured for long-term wealth preservation may limit spending flexibility, potentially misaligning the beneficiary’s individual needs and generational dilemmas.

As a further example, a recent retiree with no children wants to use funds from an irrevocable trust to purchase a vacation home. However, when the beneficiary’s now-deceased parents designed and implemented the trust, they assumed each of their children would have direct heirs, and so—in an attempt to promote intergenerational wealth—limited distributions to health, education, maintenance, and support. A vacation home purchase doesn’t meet those fixed conditions, and since it’s irrevocable, the trust can’t be amended—this despite the fact there’s no one to receive the intergenerational wealth the trust was designed to pass on.

“In that scenario, if the grandparents who formed the trust had spoken about these personal issues in an intergenerational way with their wealth advisors and family, the trust could have been designed with more flexibility,” says Slattery. “But even something less complex—like a parent sitting down with their children and their wealth advisor to communicate their intent to pass on money—can have a big impact, helping alleviate millennial anxiety around economic volatility and empowering them to try new investment strategies.”