A Financial Advisor’s Job is to Dig Deep

As if financial questions aren’t personal enough, your financial advisor wants to know how you grew up and what your family is like. Is this appropriate? The Institute of Business Finance says yes. Questions about you, your background and your relationship with money are all avenues towards achieving financial goals (icfs.com, 2013). It is important to understand that none of us live in a vacuum, meaning every financial decision you have ever made was dripping with context!

Why did you choose to pursue a career in social work? Maybe because you were raised in a tough neighborhood and realized the need for more helping professionals. Why did you donate to several charities for disabled children? Perhaps because you have a childhood friend who is disabled. Trust us when we say that a lot of good and bad financial decisions are made based on emotional, psychological and sociocultural motives. It is your financial advisor’s job to connect these seemingly unrelated events in order to develop a financial plan that works for you while considering the contextual factors that impact your financial life. For example, your financial advisor should understand how being a first generation college student impacts your approach to student loans. Or how the upsurge of technology and globalization makes bookkeeping and paying bills difficult for older clients.

Of course, not all financial advisors will agree that digging this deep is necessary. However, as a colleague put it, only talking about stock market averages, performance and spending habits is like putting a Band-Aid on an infected wound. Financial advisors should intend to cure the problem not cover it until it oozes green stuff and puss! Yuck! Instead your financial advisor should be curious about the origin of your financial issues or non-issues. Not to mention how much more likely you are to trust an advisor who sees you as more than a stack of cash. You deserve to be valued as a human who is not merely an individual but also a member of familial, societal and cultural systems. If your financial advisor seems not to care about the context within your financial story then you seriously need to upgrade. For the record, our financial advisors are well equipped to dig deep!