One of the principal duties of a financial advisor is to sit down with clients and go over their current finances in order to help them develop a short and long term financial strategy. Some people look at advisors as people we go to for help figuring out which retirement fund is best for us. Others think they are there to provide debt relief help. All of this is true. But nothing a financial advisor does is done in a vacuum. In other words, to fully realize the potential you have as a client to capitalize on the efforts of your personal finance specialist, you have to buy into his or her recommendations and do your best to make the changes necessary to make them happen.
Changes Depend on Client Trust
One of the biggest variables affecting the extent to which we actually adopt the changes called for by these professionals is our level of trust not only in their general expertise, but in its applicability to our specific life situations. We often think that we are the ones best equipped to come up with a personal budget for our lives, because we’re the ones that understand how much it takes to live our lives and to make ends meet. Yet in many cases, we have no savings; get by paycheck to paycheck; and fight mounting consumer debt with no discernable way to pay it all back without affecting retirement goals. Our own idea of our fitness for the task and the reality of our qualifications obviously don’t get along all that well. If we were so good at this kind of stuff, financial advisors would have no clientele.
Count on Experienced Advisors
If you have chosen to work with an advisor not just on some investments, but on a whole financial strategy for the short and long term, you need to be able to trust in what he suggests to you. To this end, there is a lot we can do as consumers to get our advisors clued in to the specifics of our current financial state. The argument that we are the only ones suited to make these plans doesn’t hold water when we empower our advisors to look over our finances and get a good sense of where we’re at economically. In other words, the only thing preventing a good financial advisor from being fully capable of coming up with a realistic and sustainable personal budget on your behalf is your own hesitancy to provide her with the information she needs to get an accurate assessment of the situation.
Follow Your Advisor’s Best Advice
If you are serious about getting out of the cycle of debt and to a place where you no longer live paycheck to paycheck and you actually have some money to put away for the future without robbing the present, you have to trust your financial advisor and follow his advice. To get to where you want to go, changes may be necessary. In fact, they probably are necessary. Once you allow your finance professional to get into your personal financial situation and map out a strategy to reach your goals and achieve long term prosperity, you will likely have to take certain actions to get there from there. It might mean cutting back on your spending and increasing your savings. It may mean increasing your insurance stake or doing something tangible about your estate plans. The extent to which your life will change after a financial advisor sets up a financial strategy depends on trust.
