Politely, Please Don’t Compare

It’s not an infrequent question: “Why should we work with you instead of ______________?”

Everything in that question is a good question other than the ______________ part. It’s the ______________ part that actually bothers me the most. You see, it makes sense to ask the question of how your financial planner is different, or why when you engage in what might be a professional relationship that extends both through your lifetime and well into the lifetime of your children, that you at least ensure you’ve kicked a few more tires. That’s all well and good.

But as I said before, it’s the ______________ part that bothers me the most as a financial planner. Because here in Longmont, it’s usually not a firm I’d like to hear us compared to. It’s not the Planning Center out in Moline, IL, that does some of the most robust and comprehensive planning in the United States. It’s not Ruby Pebble out in Seattle, WA, that goes the extra mile when serving the LGBTQAIP+ population. It’s not Styled Wealth, a virtual practice based in Tulsa, OK that’s increasing the accessibility of top-notch financial planning to people who want to focus on the impact their wealth can make in the real world. Or Pavilion Financial Planning in Allentown, PA that serves tech workers with bespoke equity and tax planning.

Nope. The comparison is to our not-so-local swill. Why not work with the “financial advisors” at one of the 25 McDonalds-on-every-corner branches here in town? Why not entrust our life savings to someone with a life insurance license and a high school diploma? Why not work with my partner’s cousin, he just changed careers from holding the signs for the road workers?

Now, I’m not actually much of a fan of the “buy local” phenomenon when it’s used as the sole argument for why you should shop or buy goods or services at any given place; though that’s not to say I don’t like to buy local! I understand the whole adage about “when you buy local, you’re buying a little girl her ballet lessons and not a CEO his 2^nd private jet;” but that isn’t a value proposition to the client or the consumer of the goods or services being offered by the local business instead of the mega-corporation. And to be entirely fair, the nice thing about McDonalds is that the McGriddle is just as acceptable here in Longmont as it is in the middle of nowhere on the 790^th mile of your road trip.

So this week, nine years and three-hundred-sixty-five days after beginning the practice that’s become “MY Wealth Planners,” I’m going to say the thing. The impolite thing that every professional everywhere will tell you not to say: “Why not work with the other guy?”

I Didn’t Invent the Wheel

It turns out, the smartest thing that’s been written to date about financial planners was written seven months before I was born. In fact, it’s such an important piece of writing that I assign it to my students in the Retirement Planning Class at CU every semester. It was a Journal of Financial Planning “op ed” of sorts, written by a lawyer-turned-financial-planner named Dick Wagner. “To think… like a CFP®.” You can read it at the link there, but to sum it up for those who don’t have time to read ten more pages today, this is the message: “Other professions are professions. The people who work in them understand they are professionals. They adhere to a consistent set of principles and practices and are unambiguous in their identity as members of that profession.” The piece goes on to cite law, medicine, theology, and a few other examples of professions that are unambiguously “what they are.” It then goes on to argue that the “CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER®” should be the next profession and must do the work to identify as such a profession.

Much to the chagrin of those who were thinking about this when that article was written, and despite some protests of my colleagues, today I can’t say that the CFP® Professional is uniquely a bespoke member of a profession. That isn’t to say that financial planners aren’t a profession, or real financial planners aren’t among the nascent members of a real profession; but that the CFP® Certification for all its positive qualities, does not confer membership into the “secret society of real financial planners,” as some call it.

35 years and 7 months since “To Think… like a CFP” was published, despite the very real existence of a secret society of real financial planners, the broader “financial advice industry” is still getting around to the business of thinking about it seriously. Therein is the source of my chagrin with the _____________.

You might reasonably ask why you wouldn’t work with the CFP® Professional at the McDonalds across the park, or at the corner of 17^th and Hover, or one of the several downtown and across the strip malls of Longmont. “You’re a CFP, they’re a CFP, so, why should we work with [you, CFP® Professional] instead of [that other CFP® Professional]?”

In a different text by the same fabled financial planning author, Mr. Dick Wagner put it rather succinctly: “They are not us, and we are not them.”

They & Them

But what did Dick mean when he wrote those words? Who were the ominous “They and Them” he was describing? Once again, succinctly, it was to describe the larger industry of product manufacturers and their salesforce masquerading as financial planners. Firms associated with mutual fund families, brokerage houses, and insurance carriers. And pay mind that I fairly can say that I started my career in one of those places. It took me four years to realize just where I was and what I was doing there, but I make no mistake today that until I left that world, I was a CFP® Professional selling products, not a financial planner.

Being a CFP® Professional selling products makes you little different than They & Them, credentials-or-not. It means that financial planning is a paid-for sales process, a means to an end rather than an end unto itself. The advice revolves around the inevitable solutions you’re going to want to recommend and in turn, get paid to recommend, sell, or place. And if someone says planning isn’t for them? Not a problem, let’s skip right to prescribing financial solutions without a diagnosis of financial ailments. And if they don’t want to buy those? Well then what good can we at They & Them Inc. do for you if you don’t want to buy the investment and insurance solutions on offer here at They & Them Inc.?

They & Them at They & Them Inc. can be good people. Some of the nicest people you’ll ever meet, in fact. The employees of They & Them Inc. are licensed to sell securities and insurance products, well-trained not just by their own firm but by the polished sales trainers from the companies whose products they sell. They have some of the best marketing, branding, and advertising you’ll ever see. They even regularly use the phrase “financial planning” or “financial plan” in their ads these days. Ask one what they do at a party, and they’ll be delighted to tell you that they’re a financial planner, or that they do financial planning, or something that sounds reasonably similar. Heck, they might even do something that resembles financial planning from time to time.

But dig a little deeper at the business model at They & Them Inc. Google how the polished They or Them you met at the chamber of commerce after hours gets paid. Inquire as to how They next to you in the church pew on Sunday pays their bills. And beyond how They or Them at They & Them gets paid, how They & Them Inc. really makes their money, and what they incentivize in their sales force. Now say all of that ten times fast! They certainly can, or rather, they certainly can change the subject in a hurry.

I’ll share an example from my own time at They & Them Inc. When I first became a “Financial Advisor,” I had a payout grid for my business that looked something like this in the first year:

Product or Service	Percentage of Revenue You Get Paid
Proprietary Funds	60%
Other Funds	50%
Trading Commissions	50%
Advisory Products (Also Proprietary)	60%
Insurance Products	60%
Financial Plans	60%

 

Now, take that at face value and it looks like everything is more or less equally allocated, with the only real difference being other funds and trading commissions. Never mind that on a relative basis, other funds would pay not 10% less but 16.66% less than proprietary products; and this was just a rough approximation of the scale for revenue directly generated by me as a financial advisor. This didn’t account for Proprietary Funds costing 0.7%-1.5% annually, meaning that while I might get paid 60% of a 1.3% annual investment management fee (0.78%), the firm would keep the 0.52% of the annual investment management fee, plus the entirety of the 0.7% to 1.5% of each proprietary fund, meaning that as an advisor I was making about 1/3^rd of the overall revenue generated by my work; at least the work done in the investment space.

And today, at the vast majority of They & Them Inc. franchises, whether they take the form of financial-advice-McDonalds or financial-advice-Starbucks, that is very much still the same deal. At some firms the payout to the advisor might be higher or lower, but I guarantee so long as the law permits it, there will be preferable payouts for certain products and services and less preferable payouts for others.

“Show me the incentives and I’ll tell you the outcome,” or so said the late Charlie Munger.

You might question why I’m so certain of that. Well, beyond having seen the payout grids and tables offered by many of these firms, I’ve also seen what happens when the law temporarily hasn’t permitted it. For a time in 2018 when I was still with “They & Them Inc.,” the Department of Labor passed a rule that made it all but impossible for investment and insurance companies to pay different amounts based on the products that were offered; not because they wanted to, but because the law so severely penalized conflicts of interest pertaining to whether a financial advisor could get paid more or less based on the product they recommended. While they couldn’t unify the commissions between all different types of products (i.e., mutual funds, term life insurance, whole life insurance, etc.) they were driven to levelize the payouts for like products (e.g., Class A mutual fund to Class A mutual fund, term life to term life, and so on.)

And within the same quarter that the Department of Labor’s rule was overturned by a court (the 5^th circuit, no surprise there for my legally-interested friends and readers), those levelized commissions and payouts vanished. Back to pay-driven incentives as if there had never been any reason to levelize payouts in the first place.

So when someone asks me, “Why not work with ____________?” I wish they were talking about real financial planners. I wish they weren’t talking about They & Them Inc., with its many dozen branches of the assorted franchises scattered all over Longmont. But here in Longmont, time and time again, people don’t ask why they shouldn’t work with the real financial planner in the next town over. They ask, “Why not McDonalds?”

Quitting They & Them Inc.

I referenced leaving They & Them Inc. after four years. That’s what fundamentally became the genesis moment that created MY Wealth Planners. It’s a long story, and one I’ve told before elsewhere, but when I was exposed to real financial planners, I couldn’t unsee the difference. I was surrounded by They & Them (remember, some of the nicest people you’ll meet) and yet I couldn’t unhear their casual indifference to whether what they did was not just “okay” for their clients but “the best possible thing for their clients.”

I couldn’t justify clients paying 0.3% or 0.25% or 0.15% in “platform fees” to invest in products other than the proprietary funds on offer. I couldn’t explain why I’d ever recommend the proprietary funds either, performance dwindling as it had over the years.

I couldn’t understand why financial planning wasn’t structured as an ongoing thing. Why it wasn’t more than just helping clients through not just the problems of today but the problems of tomorrow, and through the inevitable changes that were almost certainly going to happen over time, whether those be to where they were or where they wanted to go.

I couldn’t understand why we were so unconcerned about being forced to do extra paperwork to place a policy with an “unfavored” insurance carrier instead of our “partner” insurance carriers.

I was a fish who suddenly became aware of the existence of water, or so the parable goes. My unconscious immersion in the world of They & Them was suddenly apparent, and not only was I drowning, but I was taking people I cared about with me.

And so, I left.

Me, Myself, and…

Many readers have been here for the rest of the story. So, you know what happened after I left the old firm and the old way of doing business.

We changed portfolios from blends of overpriced passive and eye-wateringly expensive active funds to some of the lowest cost index products we could find.

When we established our asset management policies we chose custodians and platforms that didn’t charge additional fees or commissions, helping drive down our client’s net costs even further by avoiding such junk fees.

We made financial planning not just the first thing we do for every client, but the core of what we do for every client. We switched from selling products like They & Them to focusing on helping each client accomplish what it will take to live their best lives, and whether that means there’s a financial solution or not, our process aims to help them to the outcome they’re looking to experience.

I made the decision to apply to a research-focused PhD program in financial planning at the top financial planning research institution in the country because as I discovered the inadequacies of the old ways, I feared more what I still didn’t know, and wanted to be empowered to find the answers necessary to answer questions yet unasked.

And the recognition has rolled in for it. Both I and MY Wealth Planners have been recognized by community organizations and professional peer groups:

We’ve been recognized as the Ambassadors of the Year and Building Bridges recipients by the Chamber of Commerce, for our work both in supporting non-profit activity in the community and educational programs in the community.

I was individually awarded the New Professional award by the National Association of Personal Financial Advisors in 2023, which would be akin to something like the “rookie of the year” in another parlance (never mind that I’d been a financial professional for eight years at that point and a real financial planner for four at that point; we’re slow to get to that sort of thing.)

I was recognized as one of the eighty best financial planners by Money in 2024, and the only financial planner recognized in Colorado.

I’ve published op-eds and academic papers in the Journal of Financial Planning, been asked to speak at several financial planning conferences and for many more groups, and received my doctorate for research in personal financial planning this year from Kansas State University.

I’ve been the national representative for Next Generation financial planners on the Financial Planning Association’s Executive Committee, and served on the board search committees for both the Financial Planning Association and National Association of Personal Financial Advisors; Today I’m president of the latter’s west region board, and in the next year, I’ll serve as the chair for the Financial Planning Retreat conference, a conference that’s older than me and has been the font of some of the most cutting edge ideas in financial planning going back decades.

To torture an analogy, I’m akin to a Michelin Star chef. Probably just a one-star chef, and I’ll never shake the impostor syndrome that says I must just be a fry cook; and I’ll never stop aspiring to be a three-star. But all of those things listed? They’re not nothing, and the fry cooks at Wendy’s and McDonalds all over town do not compare.

…We

I didn’t get here on my own. Despite fierce personal and professional differentiation from the They & Them-types that I once called my colleagues, I’ve had the good fortune to work with some of the best people. Samantha, my first associate planner that many of you may remember, gave me a great deal of perspective on leadership and how to mentor and develop new real financial planners. Today I work with Daniel, Emily, and Olivia. We’re excited to be real financial planners, and it remains a privilege for us to serve our community and clients in that capacity.

MY Wealth Planners is a growing firm. We’re not done growing in capacity, experience, and capability. We never will be.

But we take distinct pride in being real financial planners; and as time goes on, it feels less dismissible to be compared to They & Them. It’s not to say everyone “should know who we are,” but that the distinction between real financial planners and They & Them is becoming clearer every day. At some point, the public has to get with the program.

In the meantime, we’ll politely answer the question just as we always have; and in total fairness, McDonalds is probably great for many people where they are and for what they need. We hope you’ll reference one of the great, real financial planning firms, when you ask the question. But in the meantime, we simply ask that as you think about us, talk about us, or learn about us, you ask the question: “Why work with you?” Leave They & Them Inc. out of the question; unless of course, you want some fries with that.