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Talking With Your Clients: Disciplined Spending

No one likes to budget, in fact, even saying the word “budget” can evoke negative reactions from clients. Of all of the vital signs, Burn Rate (Br) can be the least sexy. Unfortunately, personal spending is foundational to all other financial projections. So while it may be a hard, discussing client spending is a financial planning must.

On this episode of Elementality, Reese talks to the clients of his RIA, Dentist Advisors, about how to increase net worth without pinching pennies. Reese, and his co-host Ryan Isaac, explain why disciplined spending is so important to a client’s financial future and include tips on the best categories to use when placing boundaries on client spending.

 


Podcast Transcript

Reese Harper:
Statistically like the most optimal way to maximize your lifetime happiness with money is gonna be to neither over-accumulate or under accumulate. Okay. Like you’re going to be able to not work so hard in your…

Ryan Issac:
That you miss out.

Reese Harper:
Early years that you miss out and then you have a bunch of leftover money.

Ryan Issac:
That you can’t ever spend and enjoy.

Reese Harper:
Yeah. If you happen to be one of those people that lives a balanced life, but then turns into a billionaire, because it worked out for you. That’s awesome. But I think…

Ryan Issac:
Yeah. Different opportunities.

Reese Harper:
But I don’t think most of us would go into our careers saying, I want to overwork in my 30s and 40s so that I can pass away with a ton of money that I never really got to quite use.

Ryan Issac:
And spend 30 years later.

Abby Morton:
Hey Elementality listeners. It’s Avi. To help you better understand Elements, we’ve chosen another episode from the podcast at Reese’s RIAA. The Dentist Money Show. Elements was built on performance comparisons. And on this episode, Reese and his co-host, Ryan Isaac, look at benchmarking and how comparing their financial performance to a standard helps motivate clients to develop better habits. Enjoy.

Ryan Issac:
I’m gonna start a story about chickens. Reese, have you ever been to the island of Kauai?

Reese Harper:
Oh yeah.

Ryan Issac:
You have?

Reese Harper:
No.

Ryan Issac:
Not Kauai.

Reese Harper:
I though you said Hawaii.

Ryan Issac:
Yeah, Hawaii.

Reese Harper:
‘Cause I’m like.

Ryan Issac:
The state of Hawaii.

Reese Harper:
Yeah.

Ryan Issac:
The island of Kauai.

Reese Harper:
Nope. I’ve only been to the big island and I’ve only been to Oahu.

Ryan Issac:
I was in Kauai for seven days. So I’m an expert now. I’m gonna tell you everything you need to know. [laughter]

Reese Harper:
Okay, That’s cool.

Ryan Issac:
I am a local.

Reese Harper:
Okay.

Ryan Issac:
Actually for anyone that’s been there before you might, you’ll know what I’m talking about. So I went there with my wife a couple weeks ago and, I mean, one of the most beautiful places on earth, just insanely beautifully crazy. And it’s like this jungle on a an island, right? There’s like mountains. One of the wettest places in 2018 it was the wettest place on earth. Like the most rain, like hundreds and hundreds of inches.

Reese Harper:
It’s the wettest land.

0:02:04.8 RI: Thousands. No.

Reese Harper:
Wettest place…

Ryan Issac:
I’m getting it wrong. Don’t quote me on that.

Reese Harper:
On land.

Ryan Issac:
What?

Reese Harper:
It’s the wettest place on earth. That’s land.

Ryan Issac:
That’s… Yeah. Well, the wettest place would be the ocean. It gets the most rainfall in 2018. The mountains of Kauai. Anyway, don’t quote me on these stats. Okay.

Reese Harper:
I’m just wondering.

Ryan Issac:
I just barely became a local. I don’t really know.

Reese Harper:
Don’t hassle me. I’m local.

Ryan Issac:
Don’t hassle, Yeah. Don’t bug me. I’m local. Look, when I showed up it kind of conjures up images of this rainforest jungle like you would expect there to be snakes and tigers and monkeys. It’s so beautiful, but there’s almost like no wildlife. Some mountain goats and then farm animals. And then, but one thing, one type of animal that is all over the island, like weirdly, strangely, everywhere you look is the chicken. The chicken.

Reese Harper:
The North American chicken.

Ryan Issac:
The maybe [laughter] I would assume so.

Reese Harper:
Got transplanted.

Ryan Issac:
So, yeah. A long time ago, chickens were brought over to the island. Obviously they didn’t swim. But, so here’s what’s crazy. You get off the plane at airports, like it’s a small airport, so it’s outdoors. I mean, they’re at the airport, they’re at the car rental place. They’re by your hotel, they’re walking the beaches, they’re outside the restaurants. You can go on a hike in the middle of the island on a mountaintop in a waterfall, like eight hours in, and there’s chickens everywhere. And I was wondering, what on earth was the deal with these chickens? Any guesses? Any clue why there’s chickens like all over the island? Not monkeys. Not lizards. No snakes, no bats, no alligator. Swamp life. There’s chickens everywhere.

Reese Harper:
Dude, I got a lot of guesses, but I think they’re gonna all be wrong. I mean, I’m assuming the climate probably accommodates… Something about the climate’s probably good for them.

Ryan Issac:
I mean, it’s like a, the greenest farmland you’ve ever seen.

Reese Harper:
So it probably has plenty of worms and protein source in the ground. But Hawaii was there so many chickens?

Ryan Issac:
Yeah.

Reese Harper:
Like maybe people eat more eggs there.

Ryan Issac:
Yeah, you would. I wondered this. Yeah.

Reese Harper:
Maybe there’s more… Is it like, do they, are they a big exporter of chicken thighs? Does Costco sell all their chickens from Hawaii?

Ryan Issac:
I know. You wonder.

Reese Harper:
These are just the things of an age… These are the thoughts of an aging man.

Ryan Issac:
Of a wondering brain about chickens. So it turns out in 1992 on September 11th, 1992, there was a massive hurricane, hurricane Iniki, which in Hawaiian apparently means sharp piercing winds. It was the… Like the last major hurricane to hit the island. But massive destruction, killed six people. Almost $2 billion in damage. Thousand people injured, just destroyed the place. One of the consequences as it turns out though, is it spread the chickens that were localized to farms all over the island, the hurricane blew chickens all over the place.

Reese Harper:
Oh, interesting.

Ryan Issac:
In 1992. So fast forward like 30 years later, and they are federally protected animals that wander the island. Beautiful roosters, like you’ll sit down for a snow cone and they’ll be like a couple of hens, and then these huge roosters just like staring at you.

Reese Harper:
They do cock fighting over there or not.

Ryan Issac:
That’s actually one of the big reasons why that existed too. So they were… If I remember right, there were like an agricultural gift like hundreds of years ago to the people on the island. But cock fighting was huge.

Reese Harper:
Okay.

Ryan Issac:
And that’s where the roosters came from. So there were like these big underground rings of fighting roosters and the hurricane in 1992, blew roosters and chickens all over the island. And now seriously, we hiked hours out of civilization into the mountains to a waterfall. And I have a picture, I’m standing at a waterfall, we’re swimming this thing. It’s like everything you want Hawaii to be. And I look up on the rocks and there’s this rooster just watching me swim in his waterfall, like I own this place.

Reese Harper:
He’s like, I’m gonna come and peck your eyes out.

Ryan Issac:
I hope you brought me food.

Reese Harper:
So where are we going with this?

Ryan Issac:
Where I’m going with this is, I remember sitting on an inner tube, it was one of the cool things we do like tube this whole plantation. And there’s chickens up on the banks watching us. And I remember thinking as I heard the story, this… Everything I see reminds me of a podcast. So I wrote it all down. But this reminded me of spending, how does this remind me of spending? It reminds me of how once spending starts growing to a certain point. I mean, once you’ve committed and you’re used to spending certain dollars every month and you just kind of repeat it and you grow a little bit and you spend a little bit more as the years go on, you can’t get them back. And as I heard this story about the chickens, like they tried, the hurricane came in and it destroyed tons of stuff and it ruined all the farms, it blew this livestock everywhere. And chickens were everywhere. I mean, there was an attempt to like kind of restore things back to normal buildings, farmland, coastlines, chickens. But you couldn’t get it back.

Reese Harper:
It’s like, “Hey, chickens, go back to your dang pens.”

Ryan Issac:
“Will you just go back to where you were?” Turns out they don’t listen. [laughter] chickens won’t… They don’t respond to commands. Unlike some dogs will respond to command. So as I heard this story, I thought that just reminds me so much of how spending feels. Because once you are used to spending something, you can’t go back, when you let the chickens out, they’re out. When the chickens are on the island, they’re on the island. They’re running wherever they want. Like you used to spend five grand a month in college. Cool. You spend 12 now, or 15 or 20 and try to cut that back. Where would you cut back? A massive chunk of it’s gonna be housing. You’re probably used to driving some pretty nice cars. Your vacations are better, you eat better. There’s more groceries. Your kids are in better activities. You dress better. What do you cut back once your chickens are out? What do you do?

Reese Harper:
Yeah.

Ryan Issac:
You always go like when you do that, you get into like the budget rage. And you’re like…

Reese Harper:
“We’re gonna cut”.

Ryan Issac:
All right. This is it. I’m tired of this crap. We’re cutting. And so what goes Netflix? Audible? [laughter] like 15 bucks here and there, But like…

Reese Harper:
All right, we’re gonna stop eating out [laughter]

Ryan Issac:
It’s like…

Reese Harper:
Okay, well, and then that last about till two days later when you’re like, “Are we cooking again?”

Ryan Issac:
“This sucks. Can we just go to our favorite place. And I’ll just go make more money.”

Reese Harper:
“Look I only need to spend, look, we can spend the two hours tonight to just make our dinner the way we know it was back in when Hawaii was started before chickens.”

Ryan Issac:
Chicken freeze. So personal spending like you just said, it’s one of… It’s an element or a subject that we’ve spent a whole month on every year. It’s like the underpinning of all financial projections and your future retirement and how far your net worth is gonna last you. It’s the least sexy, least marketable piece of financial planning. ‘Cause no one really wants to think about it, talk about it, here about it. None of us really wanna look at the, like the numbers.

Reese Harper:
So what do you… What do we… When you manage personal spending, like what’s that mean?

Ryan Issac:
So the element of personal spending that is the number that’ll tell us how big your net worth has to be before your work life is optional. Before you don’t have to go back and produce anymore. That your personal spending number will dictate how much money you gotta have saved, what your real estate and your business has to be worth, how much cash you’ve got.

Reese Harper:
It also tells us how big your business probably needs to be in order for you to be able to support the kind of life that you want.

Ryan Issac:
Well, you were just saying, I don’t know if it was this podcast or another one we recorded where you were saying how spending is finally like where it needs to be, but your income grew to… [laughter]

Reese Harper:
Yeah.

Ryan Issac:
To make that true.

Reese Harper:
Yeah. It’s like, well now I know I’m able… You typically…

Ryan Issac:
That’s a good point.

Reese Harper:
I see. I think that’s typically how it… That’s how it just naturally happens in life. Anything arbitrary. Like I don’t really like… I’m like a big fan of people that want to try and budget and I like applaud that.

Ryan Issac:
It’s one of the more noble financial practices.

Reese Harper:
But I’m like…

Ryan Issac:
But the hardest one to do.

Reese Harper:
But I don’t like it either. Like in the way it’s traditionally done, Like if you go… For those of you who are like big, like in depth kind of mint subscribers or you’re a Quicken subscriber or you’re a YNAB subscriber or like any, you name the budgeting software. There’s a point where budgeting is really essential. And I think that most of the audience on this podcast though you can’t, you wouldn’t be able to pay them enough to go and budget in a granular way. Most of them are just gonna be like, that is not part of my, like, I don’t have time for that. And so the challenge is, if we know that budgeting actively and kind of like watching and budgeting, what I mean by budgeting is, I go… If you go online right now and you say free financial planning software, you’re gonna find two things. You’re gonna find budgeting software, [laughter], or you’re gonna find investment software. So you can either like invest money or you can budget.

0:11:00.8 RI: Or Track your spending.

Reese Harper:
Those are like your two main things that everyone thinks are financial planning.

Ryan Issac:
And there’s a few more in there.

Reese Harper:
There’s a couple more, but they’re just…

Ryan Issac:
It should exist.

Reese Harper:
It can’t be easily fixed with software. And so there’s no software. The easy ones can be fixed with software. So budgeting though, like if you’re gonna budget, some people would say, “Well, that means like, pick this category, establish what… ”

Ryan Issac:
Put a cap, a ceiling on it.

Reese Harper:
A cap I’m gonna do, and then track what I spend to that cap. And hopefully there’s a surplus.

Ryan Issac:
And stop.

Reese Harper:
Or there’s a stop amount.

Ryan Issac:
When you get there. Just stop.

Reese Harper:
And it’s just not that, like…

Ryan Issac:
When you get to the end.

Reese Harper:
That’s a good exercise. I think there’s like something really healthy about that.

Ryan Issac:
Well, you should track. Yes.

Reese Harper:
At certain stages of your life. Like, you have to have like a point where your category, you’re like, “I have to wait three days.”

Ryan Issac:
Some self imposed limits. Yes.

Reese Harper:
Like I have to wait three days. But there is a point in today’s world where once… Because someone’s making enough money to where they don’t have to do that anymore, they will stop doing that.

Ryan Issac:
Oh yeah.

Reese Harper:
The majority of people will not do that. Once they have enough money to not be forced to do that.

Ryan Issac: Well that’s a whole new podcast. Yeah. That’s the…

Reese Harper:
‘Cause you’re being forced to do that. That’s why you do it. Right? Like the only people that really budget are in a position…

Ryan Issac:
‘Cause the hose is just trickling.

Reese Harper:
In Their life where they need to have that kind of austerity.

Ryan Issac:
Till the income kicks up and then there’s a huge false sense of security.

[laughter]

Reese Harper:
And when that income kicks up.

Ryan Issac:
That’s another episode.

Reese Harper:
It’s like, there we go.

Ryan Issac:
The dangers of high income. Yeah, it’s true.

Reese Harper:
So I’m just saying the right kind of budgeting for someone whose income has already kicked up a little bit. We would consider it more like monitoring. It goes from budgeting to monitoring.

Ryan Issac:
Admitting.

Reese Harper:
Yeah. Admitting.

Ryan Issac:
Recording.

Reese Harper:
Being honest about what you’re spending.

Ryan Issac:
I would’ve said 12 grand a month. Turns out it’s 15 when you add in vacations and stuff that’s happening every year.

Reese Harper:
Talking about personal spending, this thing that needs to be managed. It’s the fun part about working.

Ryan Issac:
Yes.

Reese Harper:
Like it’s why you work.

Ryan Issac:
Thank you. Yes, exactly.

Reese Harper:
So like don’t… Like, I would rather see you work longer and enjoy the money you made than work less and be like austerity and…

Ryan Issac:
I think more… And a lot of people will agree with that too. I mean, you never know what the future holds and what health is gonna be like, what circumstances would be, you gotta enjoy some of that now. I think a lot of people resonate with that.

Reese Harper:
You gotta make that trade off at some point.

Ryan Issac:
But I’d be realistic in the things you’re admitting are happening on paper.

Reese Harper:
Yeah. And a lot of people, I just don’t think they’ve established their goals clearly enough to say, “Oh, that’s the consequence of the… ” I’m gonna, once, if you tell me my spending is $11,412 a month and we’ve tracked that for two years and we see it cycling and we know that that’s your spending and you say, “I wanna retire at 50 and you’re worth, $2.1 million today. And I can mathematically say you only need 2 million more and your savings rate is 30%. I’d be like, “Oh, you’re right on track.” But that same person, if your spending was 14,400 per month or 16,800 per month, I’d be like, “You gotta reset your expectations, mathematically, this does not compute.”

Ryan Issac:
It’s not gonna work, it’s not gonna…

Reese Harper:
Does not compute.

Ryan Issac:
Does not compute.

Reese Harper:
Does not compute. What we’re trying to do is we’re trying to actually make sure that the magic number we’re building your wealth to is the right number.

Ryan Issac:
Yeah.

Reese Harper:
You know the magic number that you get to retire on, we need to actually have confidence, like a high degree of confidence that that number is enough because…

Ryan Issac:
Yeah. Our motivation is not to undershoot…

Reese Harper:
‘Cause when we tell you that work is optional, we don’t want to be like coming back to you at age 81 and being like oh…

Ryan Issac:
Oh, well we didn’t know you liked to vacation.

Reese Harper:
Well, we didn’t know that you liked food.

[laughter]

Ryan Issac:
Yeah. Sorry about that part, Bob.

Reese Harper:
‘Cause I’m just gonna tell you, the typical financial planning process goes like this, “Hey, Dr. Jones, how much do you think you would like to have in retirement to be a comfortable lifestyle?” And you’re like, shoot, “I don’t know.”

Ryan Issac:
10, it’s always 10.

Reese Harper:
10, like 10 grand a month.

Ryan Issac:
Always 10, always 10.

Reese Harper:
Everyone just throws out a number. And then the…

Ryan Issac:
It’s always 10.

Reese Harper:
All the financial planning software that people have built that the financial… Like 85% of financial advisors…

Ryan Issac:
Manipulate the crap out of it.

Reese Harper:
They have two financial planning software that they use. Like there’s these two big pieces of software that run the whole industry. And you basically just put in the number that people spend and it spits out like what? And you put what investment return.

Ryan Issac:
Yeah. And you say…

Reese Harper:
You think you’re gonna have, and then it spits this number out. And most financial planners are scared to tell their client that they need so much. Right? ‘Cause they don’t wanna be like.

Ryan Issac:
Oh crap, that’s $7,000,000.

Reese Harper:
Scaring them and they’ll be like, “What are, you gotta get me better returns, man like… ”

Ryan Issac:
Yeah. Well, let’s just juice up the average returns to 16.

Reese Harper:
Well, let’s just juice these up and see where we end up. “Oh, looks like you don’t need to save a dime.”

Ryan Issac:
You’re gonna make it.

Reese Harper:
That… What you have right now is fine. It’s like [chuckle] all of these forecasts are just lies. Okay. They’re just lies. So you have to like the conservative outlook is whatever you are spending today. Okay? It probably won’t change a lot until you’re in your 70s.

Ryan Issac:
We’re gonna get in… I got some cool data.

Reese Harper:
Alright. So anyway, I won’t get into that.

Ryan Issac:
That’s fine. So here’s what I want to go to. Let’s… You’re just about to talk about this, tip number one is don’t do retirement planning, with some future in mind that spending is just gonna drop magically. I got some really kind of interesting studies here from a bunch of different banks that track this stuff over thousands of clients. But that’s like mistake number one. You were just saying this in retirement planning, people at 40 go, Yeah, I’m spending a lot, but like, mortgage will be gone, kids will be out of the house, we’ll probably cut back and… People think they’re gonna cut their expenses by 50% in retirement, you know?

Reese Harper:
Yeah.

Ryan Issac:
So for example, one study, Wall Street Journal did this big study with a bunch of people and they sat everyone down and they said, “What percentage of your current spending do you think you’ll spend in retirement?” And everyone, it was like the consensus of like 70% no rhyme or reason and it just sounds, like this sounds reasonable, you know? 70%. Then they took… Then they went back with everybody and then they split it into categories and they said like, “Okay, here’s all the categories you will spend on and here’s reasonable cost plus inflation.” You know what everything actually costs. And it ended up being 130% of what they’re currently spending.

Ryan Issac:
And the… One of the points that they made in the Wall Street Journal was really interesting is when… Part of the reason we don’t spend right now is because you’re at work all day. Like we’re busy all day. But if you work to eight, 10 hours a day and then all of a sudden you don’t and you’re just home, it’s like being on, it’s like Saturday every day and you’ve got all this time on your hands and you’re like, “Let’s buy some stuff. Let’s go to Home Depot.” Let’s get that new Traeger.” Okay. So JP Morgan, they have this cool graph, I mean have thousands and thousands of people they study on this stuff. And the graph is kind of like, there’s a surge and this is also what Fidelity found and Forbes actually too. There’s this surge, like your peak spending is in your mid to late 40s, early 50s. That’s peak spending. That’s usually probably ’cause teenagers peak career earnings. That’s when you’ll just spend the most money. But it peaks in your late 40s, early 50s and then levels out.

Ryan Issac:
JP Morgan calls this like a surge in a curve. So you can imagine it kind of like surges up pre-retirement and then kind of comes down a little bit and levels out through your 60s and early 70s. Now it does decline. One of these sources called it like a… No, it was Michael Kitces. I think, he got… He puts it in three different categories of, oh yeah, he calls it here. I’m gonna find this really quick. He calls it the… These are like three different sections of your retirement. The go-go years, the slow-go years and the no-go years. So the go-go years are like your first decade out of retirement. You’re still healthy, you still feel like being busy and traveling. And those are high spending years. The slow-go years 70s, you kind of slow down and then the no-go years are in your 80s into your 90s. And that’s like, you just… You’re not as busy. You’re not traveling as much. Just physically you’re limited. And that, and the data shows this, so peaks in the high, in your late 40s, early 50s kind of declines a little bit levels out into your 60s and 70s. And then it will drop into your 80s when people are just less mobile, which is depressing to think about. We’re just too sick to spend money.

Reese Harper:
Well, when I hear all these, I think the most important thing… Why do you need a personal CFO/financial advisor? I’m stopping calling it financial advisor ’cause every time I say financial advisor lately I feel like people tune out. They’re like, “Oh, I already got one of those”. I’m like, “What… ” This idea, personal CFO at least to me speaks more to the point of why you hire a person. You’re hiring a… The CEO hires a CFO to help consult him on financial issues.

Ryan Issac:
Financial decision making.

Reese Harper:
And so if you are hiring a personal CFO what you’re doing is you’re hiring someone to help consult you on decision making with your finances. One of the most important reasons why you would hire that kind of person is because statistically the best… The most optimal way to be… To maximize your lifetime happiness with money is gonna be to neither over accumulate or under accumulate. Okay? You’re going to be able to not work so hard in your…

Ryan Issac:
That you miss out…

Reese Harper:
Early years that you miss out and then you have a bunch of leftover money…

Ryan Issac:
That you can’t ever spend and enjoy.

Reese Harper:
Yeah. If you happen to be one of those people that lives a balanced life, but then turns into a billionaire because it worked out for you, that’s awesome.

Ryan Issac:
Yeah. Different opportunities.

Reese Harper:
But I don’t think most of us would go into our careers saying, “I want to overwork in my 30s and 40s so that I can pass away with a ton of money that I never really got to quite use.”

Ryan Issac:
And spend 30 years later.

Reese Harper:
Yeah. I never really got to use it.

Ryan Issac:
You wanna go to Disney when your kids are tiny and they still believe in the magic of Disney.

Reese Harper:
You wanna see Hawaii in your 50s…

Ryan Issac:
When you can still hike it.

Reese Harper:
In your 40s, not just your 70s. You wanna do it then too, but you wanna see it several times.

Ryan Issac:
It might be called Chicken Island by the time I’m 70.

Reese Harper:
You wanna see all four islands?

Ryan Issac:
Yes you do.

[chuckle]

Ryan Issac:
I think I’ll just keep going back there, but yeah, maybe.

Reese Harper:
It’s really hard though, really hard to make all the right financial decisions so that you can really make the most of what you have and plan in a way that you have the optimal amount and don’t run out of money to get… ‘Cause if you think about it, you got these go-go years, the slow-go years, and the no-go years. It’s like the way you invest your money affects those withdrawals…

Ryan Issac:
Oh yeah. Those types of accounts they’re sitting in, the taxes you pay, the way you treat your debt along the way.

Reese Harper:
Your spending affects it. Your taxes, your debt structure, your profitability, the investments you make in your practice.

Ryan Issac:
And that’s what’s crazy, those are all levers that change for a dentist every year: Income production, taxes, debt, liquidity, cash flow. And every time one of those changes, it changes the outcome or the decision you should make and the outcome of that decision. To like strike that balance.

Reese Harper:
And the penalty for doing it wrong… Really the penalty for doing it wrong is you’re gonna either overwork during your working years…

Ryan Issac:
And underplay.

Reese Harper:
And underplay. Or you’re gonna totally under…

Ryan Issac:
Under save.

Reese Harper:
Save and then be totally hating life later on. Those are the two most common outcomes, right? The most common outcomes are…

Ryan Issac:
Probably more common to under save.

Reese Harper:
Yeah. It’s more common to under save and under accumulate and not plan. But then it’s also, the people that do a really good job of this typically don’t end up enjoying life very much either. And they need help being reigned in and shown visibly like, “Hey, you’re gonna be fine. Here’s how to relax.”

Ryan Issac:
It’s okay.

Abby Morton:
Next time on elementality.

Carl Richards:
How do you take them from this focus on the presenting question to getting clear about why their purpose, there’s these underlying reasons that they’re… That you can really help them with.

Ryan Kilkenny:
That’s a great question.

Carl Richards:
Thank you.

Ryan Kilkenny:
I think the way that we get there is by asking more questions of them. “Well, what does that mean? What does that look like?” And to try to get more clear about it. It is so hard to not answer the question. But what I’ve found is the sooner I answer the question, the worst the actual answer is, and oftentimes that’s not the real thing that brought them there. It’s the thing that they think that brought them there, but that’s not really what they care about. There’s something else there. And it’s my job to discover what that is and he help them discover it.

Abby Morton:
You can learn more about the Elements Financial Monitoring System at getelements.com/demo and schedule a time to talk with one of our friendly financial planning experts. Elementality’s executive creators are Reece Harper and Carl Richards. Elementality is produced by Abby Morton and directed by Jordan Haynes. Have a good one.

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