When you talk to clients, you are full of advice. After all, that’s what your clients are looking for from you. You’re the one with the budgeting guide, the five- and ten-year plans laid out for them, the retirement tips, and the estate planning guides. Trust is an essential part of the advice you provide—if your clients don’t trust what you say, the relationship will not work out. There are many ways to build trust with clients, and one of the most potent methods is to let them know that you don’t just talk well, you also walk the walk.
Every interaction with a client is an opportunity for honesty and transparency. Your own sincerity will be recognizable by potential clients and existing clients alike. How could you be more honest and more relatable than by sharing with your clients how you manage your own money?
Many financial professionals have found that their most popular blog posts are about this topic. The reasons are twofold. Firstly, it demonstrates that you are good with your money and that you believe in the methodology that you preach. It resonates much more strongly with clients when you discuss their own estate planning if you have laid out the steps you’ve made to make sure your own family is set by establishing a will, power of attorney documents, trusts, and other tax-saving measures for your beneficiaries. It also gives a deeper sense of your actual financial management style, and your clients will relate to the fact that you’re making the same decisions they are about educational savings, investing for retirement, and having a “rainy day” fund to prepare for the unexpected. All of this works to give clients a deeper confidence in you and what you can do for them.
So what do you write about? Of course, you’re not going to post weekly lists of your stock choices and the amount of money you’ve accumulated in your own accounts. But you can talk about the principles you follow, such as the percentage of your monthly income that you allocate to various areas of your financial life and the philosophies that guide your own choices.
Obviously, clients want to hear about your successes—they’re trusting you to make sound decisions with their money, after all, and they want to have comfortable retirements based on the plans you’ve made and implemented for them. However, you shouldn’t be too afraid to share some of the bumpier areas as well. It would be unbelievable to act as though you hadn’t had any financial challenges or lessons learned the hard way. These personal experiences are very meaningful when shared with clients; the vulnerability is honest and relatable, and most importantly, it’s an opportunity to prove to your clients that you are always learning and always honing your craft because it affects your clients as well as yourself and your family. It is also a way to show the human element of your profession, which often looks like it’s all big numbers and formulas.
How you write about your money management it up to you and will depend on your own writing voice and style. You may find that you have resources to share, spreadsheets or books you’ve read about budgeting. Or maybe you’re the type who uses a bullet point list of items. Or are you a scheduler, with a checklist that you break down into weekly, monthly, annually, etc.? The topics you choose will also vary. You can talk about your automatic investments into retirement accounts, how you handle debt, the general types of investments you look for (no need to provide the ticker symbols or anything nearly so granular), when you file taxes, when you check in on your credit, what types of insurance you have, or other topics. Remember, you’re writing about you rather than giving advice, so just provide a snapshot of your financial life. You can let clients see that you customize all plans depending on individual circumstances, for yourself and for each of them.
