Read the Transcript Below:

Micah Shilanski  

The most value you add to your clients is reading investment journals.

Amber Kuhn  

TPR Nation, are you looking to learn more about Matthew Jarvis’s guardrail strategy and how to communicate this to clients? Visit theperfectria.com/guardrails to get exclusive access to Matt’s video example on presenting guardrails to clients, you’ll learn how to address those critical questions about how much income can be safely taken to retirement and what adjustments need to be made when the markets perform poorly. Visit theperfectria.com/guardrails to get your access today. 

Matthew Jarvis  

Hello, everyone to another of The Perfect RIA podcast? I’m your co host Matthew Jarvis, with me, as usual, the man, the myth, the legend, coming in live from Wasilla, Alaska. Micah Shilanski, Micah, how are you say, my friend? 

Micah Shilanski  

Man, I thought it was my secret underground bungle. Again, yes, it’s not like it’s not Parker. I’m doing fantastic. Jarvis, another day in paradise, yourself?

Matthew Jarvis  

Doing good, doing it in the office this week, a little mini surge. So always excited to be working with the team. Excited Micha today be talking about investments. And this actually came up recently with an advisor who was saying, Hey, do advisors focus so much on investments because they can’t figure out how to deliver value in any other way. And I thought that was a pretty insightful comment, you know?

Micah Shilanski  

I think so. Now I want to give a little defense to it as well, right? I also think because investments matter in the retirement plan, and it’s a large portion of the retirement plan is money, right? Is the investment, not the planning side of it, right? There’s a lot of other stuff you have to cover, but it becomes a big dollar amount. And so people get really wrapped around right? I think it’s industry right? Because again, like I talked about in previous pods, the many issues that we have in this industry is it’s so AUM focused. It’s not households focused. It’s not helping your clients, it’s not heartbeats, it’s not time, it’s not value, it’s all about aum. And so at the end of the day, if that’s all the industry is talking about, that’s the focus that’s the focus that’s going to be there. Obviously, so many people are going to be looking at investments. And I think that’s a very clever and I don’t be too conspiratorial right here, but it’s a very clever way that really large companies push us that direction, because that’s how they make their money. That’s not how you add value to your client, though.

Matthew Jarvis  

That’s a great point, and we need to remember, and there’s some great lines in here between behavioral management and investment management, right? Because at the end of the day, and we’ve talked about this a lot, no matter how fancy your investment portfolio, and Nick Murray has a great one. I love Mr. And Mrs. Client, if we could beat the market by two points every year, but you still run out of money in your 90s, did we win the game? Right? So investments are critical. They are certainly not the entire picture, but we’ve got to remember the behavioral standpoint, and we’ve got to judge the success of our portfolios, not necessarily by their ability to be quote, unquote, the market, but the client’s ability to stick with it. So if you have the greatest portal in the world and the client blows it up in an up market or blows it up in a down market, none of the rest of it matters. And really it’s the down market that I’m focused on drivers. Now, maybe it’s more anecdotal, but that’s where I see more issues happen in the past, is in down markets. Clients get panicked, they get concerned. They want to make massive changes, really in up markets, everyone is really happy with kind of aggressive as many issues in up markets. But push back on me if you see a different be two to one or four to one or two or 10 to one, right? Because, well, and there’s a lot of psychology there, right? Risk aversion is always higher than seeking out the gain. So there’s a lot of pieces there. And we also have to remember that our clients and ourselves are constantly bombarded by this message of, have activity in your portfolio, right? It’s just, it’s non stop. Because something I always share with clients is, I always say, Have you ever went to the New York Stock Exchange at the end of each day in every day when the market closes, they cheer. They cheer when the market goes up, they cheer when the market goes down. Why would they cheer? Even on days when the market goes down, because Wall Street makes money on volume. They make money every single day, which is why Mr. And Mrs. Client, you never see a magazine headline that says, just hold on to your investments. You’ve never seen that says, Just rebalance, buy and hold. What you always see is buy these funds, sell these investments, buy these symptoms. Why? Well, because the companies that pay the financial media, not conspiracy, just look at the ads they want activity. So everything we’re bombarded about is about more activity. Our job, Mr. And Mrs. Client, is to do what’s going to work best for you. 

Micah Shilanski  

And Charlie Munger, right? That’s what he said when you were seeing him. And Warren Buffett was, you know, I know. What should you do with Berkshire Hathaway, stock, buy it and never sell it. Never sell it. Never sell it. Mr. So that over a dozen times right of just hold this thing, it’s going to keep going up. And slightly biased in that, in a recommendation, right? But, but also, it’s not bad advice that they’re saying takes long term terms. I find it’s really important in these client conversations, couple things that I need to dispel them of. One of them is a tax illusion, right? We got to, we talked about that, dispel clients of tax illusions. I also have to dispel them of market illusions that are there. And what do I mean by this? I’m talking about how they’re focused on the markets etc, and thinking that that is a direct return on their retirement or not, or if the market went up by x or down by x, what their portfolio did. And one of the things I work on, especially in our process of success with new clients, is saying, hey, the SP 500 is a really cool benchmark for certain things. However, I want to create a bob and sue mark. What are the two of you need to do to make sure you’re retired? Because it doesn’t matter what the SP500 does. It only matters what you do, and are you on track for retirement or not? Is that going to be okay? They really like that idea, right? Because I’m trying to customize this now, is elements of the s, p, going to be in there, or elements inside of that customizable? But I wanna show are you on track for your retirement? And I want to get out of all of this conversation, up markets, down markets, etc.

Matthew Jarvis  

So Micah, things like that, that kind of terminology, that way to educate clients. That’s where, as an advisor, you can get a lot of ROI return on investment from your time, right? So if you say, I’m to spend the next 100 hours, or the next conference I go to, I’m gonna attend every mutual fund presentation or crypto presentation or whatever, you’re likely not gonna get an ROI. Maybe that’ll be fun. And let’s say that you could even, in some way move the portfolio returns. Again, it’s not going to matter if you can’t keep the client to the plan. So this is where, when I go to a conference, this is, hey, what are you telling your clients about crypto? When your clients say, I want to put everything in crypto, how are you answering that question, not from a philosophical, not esoteric, like literally, how are you answering that question when the market falls 50% How are you answering the question, Hey, should we sell everything as this time different? Those are the things where I can get an ROI, that’s where I can really deliver value to clients. Is helping them stay with the plan now, but it’s more than just words that we use. Micah, you and I were talking before we hit record about that. A lot of design of our portfolio is about behavior management, the kind of positions that we own, kind of rebalancing, way that we do, how we explain it to clients, how the statements read. All of this is from a behavioral standpoint, because we’re dealing with humans and not some AI engine, though. I guess that would probably be worse.

Micah Shilanski  

Yeah, money’s emotional, right? There’s all of these things you don’t think it is have a conversation about, you know, estate planning with a blended family. Money’s emotional on so many different topics. So investments is the same. What do we need to do to build a plan that meets the client goals and has the greatest likelihood that they are going to stick with the plan? That’s what I’m going for. So majority talked about this before, too on the bottom, I don’t know too much. 

Matthew Jarvis  

We haven’t talked about so far as we go with six hundred episodes later.

Micah Shilanski  

Yeah. I know, right. One of the things that I really like to talk share with clients is saying, I want to take the least amount of risk it has to take to meet your goals. And now that’s not giving you a risk to me two questions and saying, if you won the lottery, what would you do with the money tomorrow? Right? But it’s saying, hey, my job is to tell you, what do you need to do to meet your goals. I’m not wondering what an emotional questionnaire says you should be doing with your money. That’s a great way to go broker, to manage your money by emotions. We want your money. Manage your money based on your investments, your cash flow, your retirement, etc. That’s how we need to be looking at this for the long run. 

Matthew Jarvis  

You know, I want to make sure that also covering both sides of this, which is this is not a pass to be like negligent or or to just sort of ignore clients investments. And we see that sometimes we’ll meet with advisors, they’ll have hundreds of clients off 1000s of not a system for rebalancing. There’s not a system for investing. Every client has a quote, unquote customized model, which means whatever I felt like that day, correct? Now I can’t rebalance it because it’s super unwieldy, so I just ignore it. There’s no pass on that. The SEC and the vendor call that reverse churning. There’s no pass on that, but we quickly get to the margin of diminishing returns once you have streamlined into a sofa models that all of your clients use with the risk tolerance based on their needs and accommodate whatever unique financial situation they have. The margin of admission insurance catches on really quickly. If you’re saying, Hey, should we be 27.2% in this position, or 27.3 you’re not making a difference there?

Micah Shilanski  

 Yeah, it’s 100% the case. Now I can say I was guilty of that, right? Especially when I first started Jarvis, like all of my clients, had kind of quasi different models, what was going on, etc. And I really felt like I was doing a good job, because for each client, I was understanding their needs, figuring out what portfolio would be best, and what do they want to invest in, what do they not want to invest in, kind of building these 1000s. But at the end of the day, it became this, as you said, unruly beast that I wasn’t able to add the value we needed to add. So we had to make some big changes, and we say, Hey, cut down at the end of this, what are just the core models that this really is? And then clients have to get their different allocations to those models, or to have their risk tolerance be where we want it to be. But besides that, you know, I need to cut this down to a core, handful of models that we can manage. You know, gear towards retirement. This is the power of a niche, right? Like a lot of my clients are retirees, federal employees preparing to retirement. So what does that mean? That means great. They’re really similar in a lot of their goals. So my models are kind of geared. I’ve got some younger clients too. Well. The great news is, with younger I have less fixed income, right? I mean, it doesn’t have to be a complete model setup, but it all comes down to the niche. 

Matthew Jarvis  

It’s knowing which ones to plan and which ones you aren’t right. So it’d be all sorts of getting into commodities and futures trading and adding crypto allocation and stuff. But you need to say, hey, here are lanes I work in, and here are lanes that I don’t work in. So that when those temptations come along, when we as advisors who are notoriously have short attention spans, who notoriously like shiny objects, and you say, You know what I should add to my portfolios, is this whatever derivatives exposure? No, that’s just not a lane I go into. And so that helps me narrow my focus. Here are the things I own. Here are all the things I do know. And if by chance, the world changes, and a new product comes along and I evaluate it needs to have a process to go through and not, Hey, I just took on Bob and Sue. I bet they like this new derivatives exposure. Yeah, that’s 100% the case, right? So what’s that process?

Micah Shilanski  

How do I be effective, and how do I manage this in terms it comes a little bit more challenging, I gotta say. Challenging, I gotta say, if you’re gonna own individual fixed income items, structure notes, etc, this really does come make your portfolio a lot more complex. So you really gotta ask yourself, right? So you’re diminishing returns, where is the value that’s going to be here? Is this something I’m going to be able to monitor and really roll out with a lot of my clients? I mean, structured notes are kind of cool. However, they come with a lot of more time management issues. 

Matthew Jarvis  

They do. They’re harder to rebalance. You can’t really rebalance them. They throw off all the models. This is also something that we need to look at, right? How are we doing this at scale? Right? If you’ve got 100 or 200 or however many clients, you have an ensemble enterprise practice, you have 1000s of clients, there’s got to be a streamlined way of doing this. It can’t just be well, this way, I’m gonna do it here, and I’m gonna do it differently. The other way, you’ve got to streamline this stuff, because it’s not, it’s not bringing a lot of return to the table. It’s got to be straightforward doing it differently. Time to step up. Over here, we need a so box sound effect. Micah, like, I don’t know what the sound effect for soapbox is, but ladies and gentlemen, if I could have your your attention, please. 

Micah Shilanski  

So one of the things that we need to be focused on right now, right? And I’d love to call out advisors on this is, right, assuming you’re not driving pull up your investment account, what was your contributions to your retirement account this year and last year? Right? How much have you made? Now, I’m not just saying your IRAs. I want to say everything you’re saving for retirement, right? So not just for one case, etc, all the money that you’re saving, where is it and how is it allocated? And show me how that’s allocated compared to the rest of your clients. You know, are you investing the same way that you’re recommending to your clients, or are you a special and unique snowflake, that you’re having your own little models and you’re not actually putting your money where you tell your clients.

Matthew Jarvis  

There’s a lot of issues here, and advisors get really heated about this one, Micah, and I suspect is because most advisors know that they are following their advice. And so there’s a couple of angles here. One is Micha, you and I are both our average client. We’re business owners. We own multiple companies. Our financial situation is dramatically different than most of our clients. We could make a real case to say our personal investments could be much different than clients. We can make that case. There’s definitely a case to be made there. Yeah. But it comes back to if I’m going to tell a client to do X, if I’m going to tell a client max fund retirement accounts, if I’m going to tell them to have a diversified portfolio, if I’m going to tell them to own equities for the long run, I have to do the same thing, even if by some chance, I’m able to do some other exotic thing, take on leverage, access to something else, I have to do the same thing. And if I’m not, I am doing myself and my clients a massive disservice. So this isn’t about like arguing the nth degree here. It’s if I don’t do these things, I am doing my clients and myself a disservice. 

Micah Shilanski  

100% the case, right? One of the things that I love to share with my clients is the fact that saying, Hey, I believe so much in the investments that I’m recommending. I own the exact same things I’m invested in the exact models that you are now. It might be slightly different allocation wise. Again, my time horizon for years. Great news. You’re going to retire before me, so I’m going to be here with your retirement, right? But that means I’m going to have a little bit less in some areas, but I’m still going to own a lot of the same things you own, because I want to make sure that if I’m committed to something, I should be investing my money in as well. Now Mr. Mrs. Client, that does present a conflict of interest, I do understand that. So we might be owning the same things. And if you would ever want to see what I own in my account, I’m delighted to open it up and show you to prove that I own the same thing. Is that, okay? Yeah, you ever had someone take you up on that once. Oh, interesting. Yeah,

Matthew Jarvis  

I never have. I’m always surprised. I’m always thinking I would like to see my tax repairs tax return. Yeah, he never offers to show to me again. Sometimes people get hung up on this. They say, Well, hang on a second. Micah, you’re not a retiree, therefore your portfolio should be different. And the difference, though, is just in fixed income allocation, which is the exact same thing I tell a client who’s not retired yet, Mr. And Mrs. Client, once we get within five years of retirement, we need to start building up a five year buffer so that when not if the markets go down, we’ve got fixed in same goes for me. I am more than five years from retirement, so I can make a case. Micah, that I need zero fixed income allocation. I still, however, this just my personal allocation. I still keep a 10% fixed income allocation so I can own the same things that clients have. And I always advise clients to have a buffer. You never know what will happen in life. You always need a buffer. So does that 10% fixed income drag on my personal portfolio? 100% it does. 100% it does. But I’m endlessly committed to doing the same thing. I advise to clients..

Micah Shilanski  

Your fixed income hasn’t done nothing but go up in the last four years. Like, where have you been investing? 

Matthew Jarvis  

That’s a different episode, the after hours episode. 

Micah Shilanski  

So that’s a really important distinction, right there. And I tell the clients the same thing, right? It was saying, hey, my allocation is going to be different. Now. Again, I could justify the same thing with younger clients. I have no problem with them putting like four one case, they can’t touch the money. It was 100% in equities. Sure. Equities, sure, right? And I can make that argument for myself, but I’m defying not investing in what I tell clients to invest in. That’s the caveat. Now, there are some things that I do that I’m not investing in, right? We’re changing a lot of annuities right now, just because the change in interest rates, they’re getting better deals. So you could take this to the integrants as Mike do own the same type of all of those annuities. Fair point, I do not right, but as many of these areas that I can I wish to move into to make sure I’m putting my money where I’m recommending it for my clients. 

Matthew Jarvis  

And again, just like we tell clients, hey, if you want to have a fun money account, we can set up a fund money account. Here’s how it works, and that’s I do the same thing for the couple of fun money stocks I want to own. I want to support Elon Musk, I own Tesla shares that’s in my fund money account at an allocation that does not impact my financial goals, because again, I’m going to follow the same advice. Micah, you’re right, and this doesn’t necessarily apply 100% right? For example, I have never had a spouse who was terminally ill, and yet I still advise clients with terminally ill spouses, right? So there’s limits to this, but at the same time. Any place that I can do exactly what I tell the clients do, I’m going to do exactly that thing.

Micah Shilanski  

Not just any place that I can recommend to the client what to do, anything the client is going to do that I have an opportunity to do. I’m going to do it. Example, timeshares. I’ve been to timeshare presentations before, and one of the reasons Kelly and I first sat on one, she’s like, why do you want to do this? She’s like, it’s not worth the $200 or whatever that this whatever the discount. I was like, no, but clients didn’t do this, and I was with the sales pitch is, yeah, right. I want to see what this experience is really like. When I get my statements, I get my statements the same way clients get their statements. And I look at it, I own the same things. Now when I look at it in that structured note, all of a sudden drops in value, but it was guaranteed, it was structured. See, but it’s guaranteed. Like, what the heck. What great news. I get to see how that’s reported on Schwab. So when the client comes to the question, but on my statement, I know it’s the same thing, and here’s what it means. Remember how it’s described as A, B and C, let’s pull up your statement right now. I know that intimately, because my money is there too, and I get to see this. I tell the other advisors too. I said, Hey, if you have an opportunity to travel like a retiree would take those same experiences and see it from the eyes of a 6575 eight year old, because now, when we’re advising these clients, we can see things so much easier, so differently, and give them advice to them. 

Matthew Jarvis  

Another place this comes in. I don’t know if we’ve gotten on or off the soapbox here. The other place this comes in is the logistics of how your own account is managed. So if you’re going in there and just placing your own trades haphazardly, or doing your own cashiering haphazardly, that’s not okay. One, you’re breaking the system, right? And you’re showing your team, hey, this system is only important when it’s important, but the others you’re not experiencing like a client experiences, right? So let’s say that you want to move money from your broker’s account to your personal accounts, right? Well, if you just go in there and transfer the money to yourself, you’re not experiencing the call in having your call put on hold, having to listen to the voicemail be like whatever that case is, waiting three days, waiting the fourth day, it’s still not there. Is it going to happen or not happen? You’re missing all of those steps which are critical in the client experience. So we have to experience this firsthand, even if on paper, we could say it’s faster to just do it myself.

Micah Shilanski  

Yeah, or you want to see a really experienced have your wife call in and do the transfer, and when she’s frustrated at the experience, you’re really going to hear about it, right? Because it wasn’t taken care of. But that’s a great way to learn what’s actually being said. And how does this actually go through? Like, my wife is very smart, Kelly, she has gotten a lot of this stuff, but sometimes, like with the CPA, we’ll be chatting with them and explaining some of this tax stuff. It’ll be interesting just to hear how Kelly receives it. And it’s again, that lens of I get to see this now a little bit more through a client experience than from the advisor side. And there’s a lot to learn right there. 

Matthew Jarvis  

Yeah, there is, you know, Micah related to that is how we communicate investments to clients. You and I have the opportunity to see a lot of advisors in action. We watch a lot of recordings of advisors in their presentations, and a lot of times, especially if you’re not super attuned to body language, you can miss out that you’ve lost the prospect of the client. So you start waxing lyrical about the standard deviation of this and how the Monte Carlo simulation is that, and you don’t notice the subtle glazing of the eyes, right? You’ve completely lost them. And by doing that, you’ve lost credibility. So we think, Well, it’s my job to educate, which we translate to lecture, because we’re used to that, right? If you grew up in any kind of cool situation, I go to the industry conference that you get lectured at, right? Well, let me just glaze over and tolerate this. That’s reducing credibility with the client. You’re damaging that relationship. But if I can sit down and I can say, hey, tell me a little about your situation when the covid crisis happened and the markets fell like, how was that for you? And then they say, Boy, I almost as good as it turned around quick. I was going to panic out. That’s a different discussion. And they said, Hey, I’ve committed to not looking at my statements during those couple Okay? That’s a different discussion. So we’ve got to understand the difference between truly educating clients and just lecturing them. You know, Chairman said, I really think that comes down to empowering clients to solve on their retirement, right?

Micah Shilanski  

 That’s really what we’re going for, is, how do we empower clients that they’re not at the end of this whip getting, you know, back and forth, etc, with whatever the market’s going to do that day. How do we make them the driver in this? And so let’s pivot the conversation a little bit of saying, hey, investment allocations, it’s going to be what it’s going to be. What are things our clients can control? Okay, they can control how they’re spending money. They can control a little bit on their distribution side and a little bit on how do we make this more proactive? Now, different tax conversation. Let’s just leave this on the investment side. This is why I love the buckets so much, right? One is our five year rule. You already mentioned it before, right? And we explain that. So now we’re empowering clients that says, hey, we’re being proactive, not it. But when the markets go down, we have a plan to keep you in retirement. Your Cash Flow coming, right? So this is empowering to them. Then the other thing is the 5% distribution. I think you use 5.4% right? Either way. What this does? It empowers the client. Hey, I want to pull out $200,000 to buy an RV. Awesome. So we pull out 200,000 bucks, and we’re kind of maxed out under a 5% distribution. That means we got to reduce our income by about $10,000 a year. This is what it’s going to mean. Is that something that you would like to do, right? But now I’m empowering the client. I’m not telling the client yay or nay, it’s a bad decision. This is a guide to discovery. I’m giving them the tools toward in their retirement, and that’s also when the market goes down. We’re giving them the tools to stay invested. Says, Yeah, we absolutely could sell out 100% that is absolutely one of your choices. Keep in mind, remember, we had a plan for this, that when the market goes down, we have five years in reserve. Now. Why do we have that? Five years? 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, right? In order for that market to come back up so we can have those conversations, which are, I think that empowering them, that’s what really kind of dials down the emotional aspect of it and allows them to stay the course.

Matthew Jarvis  

It also gives us, like a way to communicate and message with the client in a way that’s delivering value and not just noise. So so often, as advisors, because we’re bombarded with investment commentary, we’re bombarded by this fund manager’s thoughts or this whomever’s thoughts, it lets us communicate with clients in a valuable way. So for example, anytime that we’re rebalancing client portfolios, especially when the market’s up, we’re letting them know, Hey, Mr. And mrs.. Client, the markets are up. We’re topping off your ward chest, right? Or, Micha, you call it that cash reserve bucket, we’re topping that off. So we have a full five years, especially right now, in today’s political and market environment, right? We’re living clients because they’re concerned, right? They’re saying, hey, these things are going on. I’m really concerned. Great. New chest is filled to the tippy tippy top. We’ve got a full five year buffer. Now, was that really any different than saying, Hey, we’ve automatically rebalanced through the changes in interest rates, blah, blah, blah, huge. It’s hugely different. It’s night and day different, actually, because I put it in a framework, the client now understands this framework. Oh, they’ve made these changes in my portfolio, so I’m better positioned for something to happen now, yeah, have we hedge or no, we’re still following the same thing we’ve always followed, but we’re putting in a way that empowers the client and they understand it, right?

Micah Shilanski  

Because now they can do something. Because what the heck does rebalance mean? Right? It’s a marshmallow, right? So really important on these conversations about, how are we empowering our clients, how are we putting this in our process of success to make sure that they’re empowered to stay in the long run? Again, my goals are making sure we’re achieving the client’s retirement goals and creating a plan they’re going to stick with when things get hard, well, it gets tight, when the markets go down, when inflation goes nuts, when a death happens, right? Any of those things, what’s a plan they are going to stick with? And I think it’s the same analogy as what’s the best workout plan, what’s the best diet what’s the plan, financial plan, the one you’re going to do at the end of the day, it’s the one the client is going to do. And it doesn’t matter how elaborate we get, if the client is not willing to follow it, it is worthless. All of your time wasn’t worth a damn cent because the client isn’t willing to take action on it.

Matthew Jarvis  

One of the fun is related to what you just said, which is, as an advisor, whatever investment strategy you follow, whatever that is, you have to be able to come into the client meeting with 100% conviction that this is the best possible investment strategy. It doesn’t mean necessarily that you don’t think there could possibly be a better one somewhere, or that there aren’t still pros and cons, or that there aren’t still risk but you’ve got to sit down and say, Hey, Mr. Or Mrs. Client for your goals, this is the best possible move we can make, which means you cannot sit down in a client meeting if you’re bearish about about equities, and you think, man, I really think with this election, the bottom is going to fall into the market. All things going to go to hell. You cannot sit in that meeting and tell clients they should buy equities. You have to sit in that meeting and say, Hey, Mr. Mrs. Client, no matter what happens with the election or interest rates or anything, I am 100% confident that the owners of the world’s greatest companies that we also own will get up the next day and say, Huh, that’s a challenge. Let’s keep going. And that’s why conviction day in and day out. And so clients hear that and they share that conviction, but it can’t be wishy washy. If you’re wishy washy, then you need to go something else. You start doing fixed index annuities or something. I don’t know if it needs to be something you have 100% conviction behind, which also means you own the same thing. Because if you have 100% conviction, you do that. That’s the only time you have conviction. 

Micah Shilanski  

You know, that’s kind of funny. And if you don’t believe that, when the market goes down and the world goes to hell in a hand basket, the owners of these companies will stand up and accept that challenge. It doesn’t matter what you own. It’s all crap.

Matthew Jarvis  

 There is that. And you can just take piece of that. You can say, like, listen, it can all hell at some point. Statistically, it will. At odds are, it’s not today. This is our least matter.

Micah Shilanski  

 Yeah, yeah. I like the former. Way you said that, not so much the latter, but yes, yeah. Well, that goes back to how you position it right.

Matthew Jarvis  

 Like, if I sit down with clients, it’s easy to be pessimistic. Well, the world’s got to end someday, and if it does, we all, you know, the whole world to death in a few months. But that’s not super empowering. Find Jesus. Come on, we could get some Empower there is that there?

Micah Shilanski  

 All right, so this podcast is all about action items. So kick it off for us. What’s a good action item our listeners can take this week and implement? 

Matthew Jarvis  

Yeah, and again, I know we end every episode with this, but it really is, guys and gals. It’s really all that matters. There are so many advisors out there that are quote, unquote, smarter than Micah and I. They have better college degrees, they have more designations. They have this alphabet, suitable letters. They speak at conferences, they attend conferences, and they’re at the other day, not helping clients. And so it’s the things that you do. So action number one, your investment allocation needs to be perfectly aligned with your clients, which means have a team member or have another advisor. Look at your models, look at your investments, and if they’re out of balance or out of model, to have make that change right now this week. Don’t wait for the market to move right now this week, make that change.

Micah Shilanski  

Yeah, just shoot an email, shoot a task, call your office and just have a get line. I love it. Number two, this will be a fun one. Ask your spouse what your financial plan is? Don’t accept the answer. Well, that’s your job, not mine, or that you have that, etc. Does your spouse know what your plan is? Does your spouse know your cash flow, your investment plan, your taxes, etc? And don’t say it doesn’t matter, right? What do we tell clients at the same day? Right? We tell clients know the spouse needs to be involved in this process so something happens to you. They need to at least know the high level of what’s taking place, not the details. Where are you at on that?

Matthew Jarvis  

I’m so relieved, Micah, you didn’t call out mine, which there’s a little post it note. I have my emergency bracelet. If you look at my medical bracelet, it says I don’t drink milk. Call Micah. So that’s what happens to me. Call Micah. He’s gonna charge you a fortune, and just blame that on me. So that’s crazy. That’s correct, yeah, but it is Jokes aside, right? It’s physician healed ice, and we think that those things don’t matter, yeah? And they do, because it’s, it’s a breach in your integrity. It’s a breach of my integrity. And it was integrity to not have these things in place, and it’s making you a worse advice. And when you look, you say, how come I’m not achieving my goals? How come my clients are they can’t trust you because you don’t trust you.

Micah Shilanski  

All right. Last Action item is, hey, we’re transforming the industry. Guys, so many days are taking wildfire. They’re spreading, etc, and it’s because the great advisors that listen to our podcast like you share this. Listen early, listen, often, vote, early. Vote. Often give us those five stars. Send this out to other advisors. We have more goals to transform the industry, and we cannot do it without your help until next time. Happy planning.

Matthew Jarvis  

Happy planning. Before you leave a quick word from our sponsors. Hey everybody, I want you to take a quick look around your office and on your desk there should be The Retirement Tax Services Desktop Tax Guide. And if it’s not there, or if it’s not burned, meaning you didn’t download the desktop tax guide. This is a must have resource for every financial advisor, committed to tax planning.