long-term goals Archives - Don Connelly & Associates

To Better Understand Your Client’s Goals, Listen Carefully to How They Express Them

/ by Don Connelly / Managing the Relationship / 0 comments

To Better Understand Client Goals, Listen Carefully to How They Express Them

A critical aspect of advising clients is to ascertain their financial goals correctly. If you or your clients don’t genuinely understand the goal, your advice could be dangerously off base, and you could lose your client’s confidence.

Clients typically come to financial advisors with various goals, but they might articulate them in nuanced ways, reflecting their concerns, values, and life circumstances. Your role as a financial advisor is to listen carefully, ask probing questions, and translate these expressions into actionable plans created around their biggest concerns, preferences, and priorities.

Here are five common financial goals clients have and how they might express them differently:

Financial Advisor Do’s and Don’ts During Extreme Market Volatility

/ by Don Connelly / Investing Wisdom / 0 comments

Financial advisors play a vital role in helping clients achieve their most important financial goals. But where they really earn their fees is during times like these, when helping clients navigate the choppy waters of extreme market volatility. Clients look to their advisors to guide them through scary times and reassure them that everything will be okay.

Emotions run high when the market turns volatile. When stressed, humans instinctively want to do something and take some kind of action to reduce or eliminate the threat. That’s when mistakes typically occur. The value of a financial advisor rises in direct proportion to the anxiety levels of their clients, who look at volatile market swings as a threat to their financial security. The critical role of financial advisors is to keep their clients from making costly behavioral mistakes. During periods of extreme market volatility, there are some things advisors must do and things they should avoid doing to maximize their value to their clients. Here are a few.

How Financial Advisors Should Manage Emotional Clients

/ by Don Connelly / Managing the Relationship / 0 comments

People aren’t rational. We’re all creatures of emotion. Good salespeople bear that in mind. Whatever your training and education, as financial advisors, we’re not engineers. We’re not technicians. Not in the sales interview.

We deal with people first.

Not numbers. Not machines.

Advisors who understand this are going to do better than advisors who don’t.

How to Prepare Your Clients for The Next Market Correction

/ by Don Connelly / Managing the Relationship / 0 comments

The Natixis Investment Managers 2018 Global Financial Professionals Survey revealed that 57% of advisors believe investors are unprepared for a downturn. This illustrates how difficult it is to convey the nature of turbulence to clients – and that volatility is an unavoidable part of the investment process.

Take the lead – prepare and educate your clients on the nature of market volatility. Then it will be far easier to counter their anxiety when the next market correction comes.

Here are 5 things you can do right away.

It’s The Little Things That Add Up in The Long Run

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It Is The Little Things That Add Up in The Long Run

Having big ambitions is great – but if you want to achieve your long-term goals, you need to know there’s no rapid escalator to success. Only by learning the art of self-discipline and taking small and consistent steps will you reach your ultimate target. Here’s how smaller steps can lead to bigger things.