Zebra Smash - Real Financial Planners | Real Conversations

Roger and Ben talk to Caleb Brown of New Planner Recruiting about the "state of the union" of advisory firms and hiring aspiring planners. There's a "war for talent", and "A players" are hard to find. We laugh, we cry, and at some point we make an offer to endow a set of pens to our local financial planning university programs, in lieu of an endowed Chair. Good times.

Some additional highlights from the episode:

• How to make a job descriptions that stand out in a crowded field
• What are top job candidates looking for in a position, and what are top advisory firms looking for in job candidates
• Ways in which both firms and job candidates are being unreasonable
• Advice for firms that are wary about hiring planners right out of school or who are relocating geographically
• The roles that university programs and professors are playing in terms of job placement and job satsifcation, both good and not so good
• Why firms should consider outsourcing the inital phases of the hiring process

New Planner Recruitng

Option B, the newly released book by Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant.

Is a fiduciary obligated to vote proxies? If so, how would a firm implement a proxy voting policy? What is our proxy voting obligation on positions the client insists on owning?

We cover all of this stuff in a quick episode. Roger's firm has been voting proxies for several years now, so he has built up a decent amount of knowledge (and rage!) on the subject.

Vanguard's proxy voting policy:

https://about.vanguard.com/vanguard-proxy-voting/voting-guidelines/

Dimensional Fund Advisor's Corporate Governance Page:

https://us.dimensional.com/about-us/corporate-governance

Blackrock/iShares Proxy Information and Policies

https://www.blackrock.com/investing/products/mutual-funds/proxy-information

(CFP CE quiz available at www.cheetahsmash.com.)

Perhaps no single document contains as much valuable information about a client's life than their tax return. Successful advisors need to know how to navigate tax returns and identify those entries that bear scrutiny or indicate planning opportunities.

In this episode, Roger and Ben describe the processes and checklists that their respective firms use when reviewing client tax returns.

If you take away just one thing, we hope it's the idea that simply having such a checklist is critical to ensure consistency and completeness across reviews, particularly if you're looking to scale your practice.

But you want to take away more than one thing, right? Of course you do. That's why you listen to Zebra Smash. Our deep dive into the 1040 includes:

• Everyone's favorite supporting schedules: A, B, C, D, E, and even F
• Commonly seen issues with Qualified Charitable Distributions (QCDs) and Original Issue Discount (OID) income
• How to use Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) to your advantage
• Identifying planning opportunities based on self-employed income
• Frequently missed deductions and/or credits
• Some incoherent ramblings from Roger about the foreign earned income exclusion and the foreign housing exclusion. Be sure to google both topics to undo whatever he puts in your brain.
• Communicating the results of reviews to clients

We didn't talk about too much stuff that we can link to, but here are a few interesting items:

• Download a copy of the 1040 and follow along at home!
• Did you know there's Income Tax cocktail? Looks delicious! (Please drink and do your taxes responsibly.)
• The Schoolhouse Rock way of teaching taxes
• Steve Martin's classic advice about how to be a millionaire and never pay taxes

On this very special episode of Zebra Smash, we don't just break the Fourth Wall, but the Fifth and Sixth Walls as well. With 10 episodes (counting the Prequel), we figured we would share a little bit about what we've learned about podcasting, particularly as the first CFP CE-eligible podcast (to our knowledge).

So it's not just a regular episode...it's a META-sode! (Insert heavy timpani drums here.)

We touch on the following key points:

• Why did we choose Squarespace and not Wordpress to host our site?
• The challenges of having a sister site (www.cesmash.com) for our CE-eligible quizzes
• The issues (monetary and otherwise) of being a CE sponsor with the CFP Board
• Successes and failures with audio recording, particularly when 3 people aren't in the same location
• How a recording becomes a podcast. (This is admittedly less interesting than how a bill becomes a law.)
• Realizing how hard it is to track listening and download metrics
• Grading ourselves against our original vision of being, "A conference in your pocket."

• Audacity - free audio software for recording
• Fiverr - freelance services for the lean entrepreneur
• Zencastr - cloud-based podcasting site. It didn't work as advertised for us, but maybe it will work for you...
• Ecamm - call recorder for Skype; good back-up for Audacity, hopefully better outcomes than Zencastr for episodes with 3+ people (Mac only)
• Libsyn - Podcast Hosting Services (maybe future home of Zebra Smash...?)
• Blubrry - podcast directory service; podcaster dashboard allows us to monitor the number of downloads for each episode. It's how we know 5 million people are listening! (Stats may be exaggerated.)

When I (Ben) played basketball in high school, we used to have plays called "quick hitters," where the play involved 1-2 passes at most. (Having said that, my junior year we went 3-22, so...).

Nostalgia aside, we have a Quick Hitter episode for everyone this week. Roger compiled some data on what it might cost to move to move his document storage to the cloud and nearly burst a blood vessel. And rather than do anything about it, we thought it would be therapeutic for him to share his information and his rage. Ben tries to talk Roger off the ledge, and more or less succeeds...or does he?

No real show notes for this one, but we thought we'd share links to our respective document management solutions.

• Worldox
• NetDocuments

(CFP CE credit quiz at www.cheetahsmash.com)

In this episode, Ben and Roger welcome Ben Opipari, writing instructor and coach and the founder of Persuasive Matters, to talk about persuasive writing. (Two Bens on one podcast? What are the odds? Let confusion reign!)

The ability to communicate clearly and effectively in client letters, emails, blog posts, newsletters and even Twitter is critical to a financial advisors' success, particularly when you are trying to encourage a prospect or client to take and act on your advice. This episode is full of actionable takeaways:

• What persuasive writing is, and what it very much isn't.
• How to become a better writer
• The golden rules of sentence construction, and why embedded clauses, semi-colons and commas can stop readers in their tracks
• The importance of avoiding the "nominalization" of verbs. You'll have to listen to learn what this means. It blew my mind.
• Common myths and misconceptions about writing. Starting a sentence with the word "and"? Splitting infinitives? Prepositions at the end of sentences? All cool. (But passive voice is still bad.)
• Tips on creating and maintaining a firm-wide writing voice.

• The New York Review of Books
• The Atlantic
• The New Yorker
• Oxford American
• Anthony Doerr
• Howard Marks' memos
• The annual Berkshire Hathaway shareholder letters
• Other writing by Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger
• Bob Veres
• Ben Carlson (A Wealth of Common Sense)

(CFP CE credit quiz at www.cheetahsmash.com)

Through our experience on various NAPFA boards, we've been lucky to make the acquaintance of Dave O'Brien of Evolution Advisors in Midlothian, VA. In addition to his advocacy of fee-only planners and the fiduciary standard in the public policy realm, Dave is incredibly well-versed on the role that advisors can play with workplace retirement plans, having presented on the challenges and opportunities in this area at multiple conferences.

Dave joined us and walked us through all the things that advisors who are interested in this space should know, including:

• Decision matrices between SEP and SIMPLE IRAs, Solo-401ks and profit-sharing plans
• New comparability and legal discrimination (which isn't as icky as it sounds)
• The four essential roles and responsibilities for any profit-sharing plan
• The advantages of creating a "safe harbor" 401k, and the necessary requirements to do so
• Some AWESOME acronyms, including QACA (Qualified Automatic Contribution Arrangement), QDIA (Qualified Default Investment Alternative) and QBERT (ok, we made up that one).
• Considerations when constructing the investment menu for 401k plan participants
• The different levels of fiduciary service to plans
• Four different "service models" when working with workplace retirement plans

Some helpful links about stuff we mention in the podcast

• When Solo 401k plans exceed $250,000, they need to file form 5500 EZ
• Do you have a client covered by two workplace retirement plans at unrelated employers? SCORE! Each one has separate Section 415 limits!

Roger was at the February 2017 Technology Tools for Today (T3) conference in California. He came back with a 102 degree fever and some notes on the experience.

We can't resist some bullet point takeaways:

• THE CLIENT EXPERIENCE IS CHANGING!!! (Says tech vendors with a vested interest in helping you change the client experience.)
• Should technology help make life easier for your current clients? If so, why the emphasis on sales and prospecting in vendor presentations?
• Disney takes trademarks stuff very seriously, as evidenced here, here and here. Don't mess with the mouse.
• We blanked on the name of Junxure's CEO. It's Greg Friedman. The name of his advisory firm is Private Ocean, not Blue Ocean. But Blue Ocean Strategy is a great book!

Links to other things we mention:

• Technology Tools for Today
• Junxure
• Salesforce
• Riskalyze
• NetDocuments
• WorldDox
• MoneyGuidePro
• FinaMetrica
• eMoney Advisor
• The "What's a hero" speech from The Big Lebowski

Roger caught up with financial planner/Congressional candidate/teacher/school principal/video master Andy Millard at the Technology Tools for Today conference in beautiful Garden Grove, CA. Ben was safe and sound in his house in North Carolina. And despite being in different time zones, the three of us harnessed the Awesome Power of Technology to talk about how advisors can use videos to better connect with clients, prospects, and even potential employees.

Andy touched on some critical elements of what makes a good advisor video:

• Be authentic
• Keep it short, as in 30 seconds. If it's longer than 2 minutes, you're toast.
• Make 1 point, and make it interesting
• Tell a story. Use a script, if possible.
• Use evergreen content

Andy also mentioned a few technical items for better quality videos:

• Zoom H1 recorder, for recording separate audio
• Giant Squid Audio Lab Omnidirectional Microphones
• You can turn your iPad into a telemprompter. Learn how!

Some of the favorite videos we mention in the podcast are still available on Andy's YouTube channel, like the ones about liquidity; credit default swaps; happy poor/unhappy rich; and the granddaddy of them all, the geyser video.

You can learn more about Andy's current projects at www.andycanhelp.com. You can also follow Andy at MillardCFP on Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+.

Fun fact: Did you know that by 2020, 82% of all online traffic will be video? And 75% of that traffic will be videos of cats chasing laser pointers and getting the bejeezus scared out of them by toasters? The future can't get here fast enough.

In this episode, we recap the Symposium recently put on by the South Region of the National Association of Personal Financial Advisors (NAPFA) in Atlanta, GA, titled The Softer Side of Financial Planning. This event is special to us, since at least one of us has been involved in the planning or running of this event in each of the past 6 years.

This year, Ben actually served as the emcee of the Symposium, while Roger participated at a simulcast site in Houston. On the podcast, we touch on the general content of each presentation, along with our impressions and general takeaways. Roger also provides some social commentary on the traffic situation in Houston. Also, the word millennial comes up a lot. Don't be frightened.

Symposium Speakers:

Christy Eckoff (Director of Gift Planning, Greater Atlanta Community Foundation) : "Generational Lens"

Lisa Kirchenbauer (Omega Wealth Management): "Essential Skills of an Exceptional Planner"

Nicole Pinkham (SummaSource at Auburn University at Montgomery): "Communicating to Increase Client Engagement"

Dr. Daniel Crosby (Nocturne Capital): "Improving Client Outcomes Through Behavioral Finance"

Panel (Lisa, Nichole and Daniel): "Client Management and Communication"

Neat Links

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI®)

Kinder Institute of Life Planning

You can buy Dr. Crosby's book, The Laws of Wealth, at Amazon.com

Houston's I-10 freeway has a total of 26 lanes. It's thought to be the largest freeway in the world. No offense, but that sounds terrible, and I'm originally from Los Angeles!

Color Coordination for Men, so that Roger never again makes the cringeworthy mistake of mixing black, brown and blue all at the same time.