Zebra Smash - Real Financial Planners | Real Conversations

Ann Gugle of Alpha Financial Advisors in Charlotte, NC joins Ben and Roger to recap her experience at 2017 AICPA Engage Conference.

Do you constantly dream of being surrounded by 4,000 CPAs and financial advisors who live and breathe for the latest tax planning strategies and exotic step-up in basis techniques...IN LAS VEGAS?!? Then this conference was for you.

Find out why the AICPA conference is considered to be at the top of most people's lists for the conference with the Best Technical Content lists. And hear the challenge of networking with 4,000 people in the cozy confines of the MGM Grand.

And for those who want to hear more from Bob Keebler - who presented a keynote session at the AICPA conference - consider registering for the 2017 NAPFA National Conference in beautiful Orlando, FL. Bob will be conducing a three-hour session on Tax Planning and IRAs at the pre-conference, as well as a breakout session during the regular conference.

If you're a regular listener to this podcast, there's a good chance that you're the one at the beach wearing khakis and a sensible button-up, with a solid business/self-help business book in hand. And have we got the book for you!

Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit: The Secrets of Building a Five-Star Customer Service Organization isn't a long book, clocking in at just 144 pages. But as authors Leonardo Inghilleri and Micah Solomon suggest in Chapter Three (Language Engineering): "Every. Word. Counts."

This book has made an impact on both of us, so much so that it's required reading for new employees at both of our firms. In this episode, we provide a brief tour, with extended stops at favorite parts along the way:

• Anticipatory Service
• The Four Elements of Excellent Customer Service
• Creating a Preferred Language Lexicon
• Turning Service Failures Around/The Perfect Apology
• Client Feedback/Seeing Your Firm Through the Eyes of a Client

We could easily have spent another hour talking about the book, but hopefully we've whetted your appetite enough for you to buy a copy. So lather on the sunscreen, grab a floppy hat, and get out to the beach and read!

Exceptional Service Exceptional Profit

Bonus Read: High-tech High-touch Customer Service

We promised our faithful listeners that every 10 episodes, we would do a "metasode" to check in to see if we were accomplishing the goals we set for ourselves, share some lessons learned, and talk about what the Zebra Smash of the future might look like.

And after 20 mostly glitch-free episodes, we finally experienced the coming-of-age ritual of every podcast: completing an episode, only to discover that one of us hadn't recorded properly. Based on minutes of research, we're fairly confident that we made it farther than any podcast in the history of the universe before our first major recording snafu. So we've got that going for us.

We buckled our chinstraps, laced up our boots, did some more sports preparation thingies and tried again. Frankly, this recording is 10 times better than the first one. That one was terrible. But this one? Pure gold.

In this episode, we talk about:

• Stats that show that, yes, people are listening.
• Stats that show that, no, people aren't taking as many CE quizzes as we thought.
• Stats that show that, yes, some people are putting some money in the tip jar.
• Stats that show that, no, it's not much.
• Absolutely no objective stats that help us evaluate if we're living up to our "conference in your pocket" tagline.

If you have a question or a topic that you'd like us to explore on a future episode of Zebra Smash, let us know at [email protected] (now staffed by live humans!).

Intro inspired by the great Gene Chandler...

How much are financial advisors charging their clients? How are most advisors calculating their fees? What constitutes a reasonable fee these days? Bob Veres put out a survey and study recently that tries to answer those questions.

To learn more about Bob Veres, here's his website. You can subscribe to his newsletter there, which will give you access to the study we discussed.

Bob Veres Inside Information: www.bobveres.com

Roger is on vacation this week, but we want to provide a quick episode where we review two software programs that we've found to be helpful in our respective firms.

Remember on Reading Rainbow when kids would review books then finish with the catchphrase, "But don't take my word for it!"? Well this is the adult financial planning version of that. But without books. Or LeVar Burton. Or rainbows.

What we talked about in this episode:

• Keepass = keepass.info
• Slack = www.slack.com

We wanted to put that awesome Reading Rainbow sound after each review, but chose not to due to a combination of laziness and copyright concerns. Instead, we'll link to some guy's website who evidently has no such worries: Da Da Dah!

On this week's episode, Roger and Ben are joined by John Gugle of Alpha Financial Advisors, who provides a recap of the 2017 FPA Retreat conference.

Rather than link to each speaker that John mentions, you can check out the agenda for the entire conference here. (Note the absence of the "bells and incense" portion of the first night from the conference agenda. Bait and switch!)

Next year's retreat is already scheduled for April 23-26, 2018, in Phoenix, AZ, so start marking up your calendar now.

Roger provides a recap of the 2017 NAPFA National Spring Conference in beautiful Bellevue, WA. We cover the keynote sessions, highlighted breakout sessions, and talk about the challenge of planning a conference when you try to balance new topics and voices against the draw of repeat speakers with high name recognition that get people in the door. (You can access the conference agenda by visiting the NAPFA website.)

Mark your calendars now for the 2017 NAPFA National Fall Conference in Orlando, FL, which will take place from October 18 - 21.

While attending the NAPFA National Conference in Bellevue, WA, Roger had the privilege of sitting down with Bill Bengen, one of the true financial planning legends. (Ben had the privilege of sitting comfortably in his home.)

Bengen's landmark 1994 paper in the Journal of Financial Planning introduced the world to the now-famous "4% Rule", which stated that based on historical returns for stocks and bonds, a retiree who withdrew no more than 4% (actually, 4.2%) of their initial portfolio and then adjusted future withdrawals by inflation had the greatest chance of not outliving his or her funds.

And just like Louis XV, after Bengen came the deluge of researchers - including Bengen himself - who revisited, and refined the concept of Safe Withdrawal Rates. And many a PhD was hooded...

• Bengen's motivation to research safe withdrawal rates
• Data sources available at the time
• Strengths and limitations of the 4% rule
• The role that taxes and tax-deferred accounts play on Safe Withdrawal Rates
• New research on the impact that including small cap stocks has on the 4% rule. (It's HUGE!)

• The original 4% rule paper
• Wade Pfau's website (www.retirementresearcher.com) has an entire archive section dedicated to the 4% rule
• Two new software packages (The Big Picture and Timeline) are built on the premise of helping advisors determine safe withdrawal rates for clients. Michael Kitces reviews both programs in a recent blog post.

(Ready to take the CE quiz? Head over to www.cheetahsmash.com...)

Remember that song by Alabama called "If You're Gonna Play in Texas (You Gotta Have a Fiddle in the Band"? No? Well we recommend it. We're not quite sure why a band called Alabama is singing about Texas, but that's a topic for another day.

In any case, it's a similar story if you're gonna be a financial advisor in Texas. You gotta know about oil and gas. And now that the shale boom has spread across the nation, this topic is going to be important in most other states as well.

Disclaimer: This episode is 100% free of legal and tax advice. As far as we know, there's no insurance or medical advice either.

• We got a ton of help from a brilliant book called Money In The Ground. We link to it below. If you have an office library, we recommend having a copy just in case.
• Mineral vs. surface rights
• Components of an oil lease
• Royalty vs. working interest
• Intangible drilling costs, including our nominee for the most obscure CFP exam question in the world. (Hint - It has to do with intangible drilling costs, alternative minimum tax, and geothermal steam.)
• Depletion taxation and estate planning implications
• Seriously, you should really consider that book linked below. The author did a stellar job.

• I drink your milkshake - Now a certified hipster meme!
• Wondering if you have oil and gas production in your state? Check out these maps from the Energy Information Agency.
• Here's one of dozens of videos about horizontal drilling and fracking. Remember, fracking itself is old technology! It's the horizontal drilling plus fracking that has changed the game.
• The critics' reviews of Armageddon on Rotten Tomatoes are worth a read.

Dr. Nathan Harness, Instructional Associate Professor and TD Ameritrade Director of Financial Planning at Texas A&M University, joins Roger and Ben to talk about the current state of academic financial planning programs.

You'll see from the get-go that Dr. Harness is a sharp cookie. And not only does he have an enviable CV (including another coveted 40 Under 40 spot), he sings a mean karaoke.

There's so much meat here that you'll hear us say multiple times that we could address a number of tangential topics in a future podcast. But we're living in the present. In the immortal words of Colonel Sanders in the historically accurate Mel Brooks classic Spaceballs, "We're at now now. Everything that's happening now is happening now."

So what did we talk about? Among other things:

• Dr. Harness' journey into academia
• The benefits that thinking like a researcher can have on financial planners
• Teaching about comprehensive financial planning is complicated by the fact that there's no universally accepted definition of the concept. Or in Dr. Harness' much more educated words, "there's an absence of a multitude of normative practices." We told you he's smart!
• The Kafka-esque series of events that needs to take place to get a new financial planning course offered at the university level, let alone a major course of study
• The secret weapon that firms that aren't geographically close to the premier academic planning programs can use to attract top-tier students for employment (Hint: it rhymes with hinternships.)

• There's a great article on Bill Gustafson of Texas Tech fame here
• For the academia inclined, those who live in close proximity to the academically inclined, or those who just like chuckling at small-minded departmental politics, you'll find lots to laugh at in Julie Schumacher's 2014 novel Dear Committee Members.
• Straight Man is also a funny novel about academia