Beyond the Balance Sheet: Five Life Dimensions Every Advisor Should Know
Every advisor covers wealth. It's the training, it's the licensing, and it's what clients believe they're buying. There's no argument to be made against doing it properly.
It's also about a fifth of what a client's life consists of.
Wealth
Accumulation, allocation, tax, distribution, risk. Advisors are good at this, and the profession has spent forty years getting better at it. It stays first, because it funds everything else on this list.
The limit is that it's now the part a client can get in ten other places, several of which are cheaper than you are.
Purpose
A founder I worked with sold his company at sixty-one for a number that answered every financial question he had ever had. Within a year he was calling me every few weeks about nothing in particular. He hadn't lost any money. He'd lost the reason he got up in the morning.
Nobody had asked him what he was going to do with himself, because the plan had quietly assumed the money was the answer. Advisors who raise purpose before the liquidity event become hard to replace, because that conversation is on nobody else's agenda.
Health and longevity
A plan that runs to ninety-five, held by a client whose current habits point somewhere nearer seventy-five, is a planning problem. It's usually the one nobody says out loud.
You're not the doctor. You are the person holding the thirty-year projection, which makes you the person best placed to notice that the projection and the client are heading toward different dates. Raising it once, plainly, and bringing in somebody qualified is the whole of the job.
Experiences
The trip that has been on the list for eleven years. The boat that's always three years away. Clients who are excellent at accumulating are frequently poor at spending, and they've had four decades of professional advice reinforcing the first half of that sentence.
Funding an experience the way you'd fund any other goal, with a number attached and a date attached, is what moves it out of someday and into the plan.
Legacy
Wider than the estate documents. What the wealth is meant to mean, who has been told, and whether the next generation has any idea what their parents intended.
Most of the damage done by an inheritance comes from surprise. A family meeting held while everyone is healthy prevents more of it than any document an attorney can draft.
Five dimensions. Every one of them affects the money, and only one of them shows up in a standard annual review. That gap is what Dream Architect Life was built around, and closing it is what makes a client relationship difficult to compete with.
