profile in san antonio business journal

march 12, 2010

Finance may be all about the num-bers, but over the last 15 years, more and more financial plan-

ners aren’t starting with spreadsheets. Instead, they are delving into their cli-ents’ emotions, values and hidden goals in a process that has become known as “life planning.”

“It is a way to get to a true client-focused approached to financial plan-ning,” explains Kevin Moore, princi-pal with i-Financial of San Antonio. “The discussions you have with clients go deeper than the traditional ways to think about financial planning. It helps both them and us understand their relationship to money — and where they want to go in life.”

The conversations, Moore says, go well beyond estimating investment risk tolerance or savings calculations for a safe retirement. They go into what a safe retirement or being financially secure actually means to a client. “It is not about getting their assets under management and charging 2 percent, or how many life insurance policies we can sell. It is really about under-standing you and your wife and kids and what is it that you want to do with

Financial planners placing bigger emphasis on client’s values, life goals

BY RICHARD ERICKSON

F inance may be all about the numbers, but over the last 15 years, more and more fi nancial planners aren’t start-

ing with spreadsheets. Instead, they are delving into their clients’ emotions, values and hidden goals in a process that has be-come known as “life planning.”

“It is a way to get to a true client-focused approached to fi nancial planning,” explains Kevin Moore, principal with i-Financial of San Antonio. “The discussions you have with clients go deeper than the traditional ways to think about fi nancial planning. It helps both them and us understand their relationship to money — and where they want to go in life.”

The conversations, Moore says, go well beyond estimating investment risk toler-ance or savings calculations for a safe re-tirement. They go into what a safe retire-ment or being fi nancially secure actually means to a client. “It is not about getting their assets under management and charg-ing 2 percent, or how many life insurance policies we can sell. It is really about un-derstanding you and your wife and kids and what is it that you want to do with all of this that you are accumulating during your life,” he says. “We have to understand what the real objective is.

“All of us go through life transitions,” Moore continues. “We grow up and be-come adults, get jobs, get married, have kids, retire. So we ask a lot of questions up front regarding your feelings and emotions to understand the clients’ feelings and val-ues toward those transitions and then use fi nancial planning tools, techniques and products — insurance, budgeting, invest-ments, estate planning, retirement plan-ning, education planning and all the rest — to support their vision of the future.”

Moore charges either a set fee or $150 an hour to discover that vision and create a plan, and then has products available to fulfi ll that plan if the client wishes.

Movement in the makingOne of the pioneers of determining a

customer’s real values and goals is George Kinder, who founded the Boston-based Kinder Institute of Life Planning in 1992.

“Really, I always worked with clients this way from the very beginning,” says Kinder in a phone interview from his home in Ha-waii. A certifi ed public accountant and tax advisor, Kinder explains he found that his tax clients were nearly always eligible for more deductions than they realized. “The only way to fi nd that out was to talk to

them, to fi nd out how they lived their lives and who they were. It seemed to make sense to do that in fi nancial planning as well.”

In the late 1980s, he gave a presentation called “The Human Side of Money” to a Financial Planning Association na-tional conference in Wash-ington, D.C., and “it was hugely popular. I was called back again and again and that surprised me since I wasn’t politically connected with the fi nancial planning industry in any way.”

From those presenta-tions, Kinder wrote his fi rst book “The Seven Stages of Money Maturity: Understanding the Spirit and Value of Money in Your Life.”

“It was directed at the general public, but sold extremely well to fi nancial planners,” he notes. “The best ones are personable, care about their clients and usually engage in deep conversations with them. But they didn’t know how to handle the emotional issues that came up. And some of those is-sues had major fi nancial implications.”

The institute, which has trained more than 1,000 planners, offers a basic two-day training course, primarily, Kinder says, teaching listening skills “and how you build a bond of trust so clients don’t think of you as just a salesman.”

The next step is a fi ve-day intensive ses-sion, followed by six months of contact with a Kinder-trained mentor. The result is a designation of Certifi ed Life Planner, a professional designation created by the institute.

Key questionsLinda Rudd, who holds a Certifi ed Fi-

nancial Planner (CFP) designation started her career as a fi nancial advisor with a lo-cal bank. Now a mortgage planner with Legacy Mutual Mortgage, she took the Kinder basic life planning course years ago.

“One of the exercises we did in that training did have an impact on my career,” she says. “They put us through the exer-cise of the three questions and I still use it in training sessions I conduct for various

local groups. It’s a paradigm shift for most people.”

Briefl y, the “three questions,” what Kind-er calls “the starting points,” are:

• You have all the money you need. How would you live your life?

• You found out you have fi ve to 10 years to live. How will you change your life?

• You’ve been told you have 24 hours to live. What regrets do you have? Who did you not get to be?

“The answer (to the third question) is usually not that I wish I’d had one more car or another vacation home,” Rudd says. “It’s looking backward at what you missed in your life. That’s not usually a materialis-tic thing, but a quality of life or the value of a relationship.

“I think that is what this new movement is trying to harmonize. You fi nd what is important to you from a quality-of-life standpoint, you quantify it in dollars and then you try to bring the two together,” she adds. “I think if more mortgage plan-ners had embraced this type of approach, we would not have the mortgage debacle we’ve had. If they cared about you and just didn’t want to close the deal and make money, all of those homeowners might not be facing foreclosure.”

Challenging status quoAccording to Eva Brodzik, Kinder Insti-

tute’s director of business development — who is based in Kansas City — the basic approach to life planning is to go much deeper into the client’s motivations than has normally been the case.

“Life planning uses conversation skills and much more open-ended questions,” she explains. “In that way, it gives the client permission to talk about things that might never come out. People are not used to being asked those questions, and it takes them through the process of discovery. You fi nd where those beliefs come from so you know what you are really dealing with.”

Some more traditional fi nancial planners

SPECIAL REPORT

PERSONAL FINANCE: WEALTH MANAGEMENT & TAX PLANNING22 MARCH 12, 2010 SAN ANTONIO BUSINESS JOURNAL www.sanantoniobusinessjournal.com

CATHERINE DOMINGUEZ / SAN ANTONIO BUSINESS JOURNALKevin Moore has taken Kinder’s two-day training course.

Getting to know you, better

PROFILE: DION PADILLA — 24 FIVE MINUTES WITH SARA BROULLIARD — 26 THE LISTS — 29 & 31

‘THE DISCUSSIONS YOU HAVE WITH CLIENTS GO DEEPER THAN THE TRADITIONAL WAYS TO THINK ABOUT FINANCIAL PLANNING.’Kevin MoorePrincipal, i-Financial of San Antonio

See VALUES, Page 30


BY RICHARD ERICKSON






























SPECIAL REPORT






See VALUES, Page 30


BY RICHARD ERICKSON






























SPECIAL REPORT






See VALUES, Page 30

CATHERINE DOMINGUEZ / SAN ANTONIO BUSINESS JOURNAL

Kevin Moore has taken Kinder’s two-day training course.

by RichaRd ERicKson all of this that you are accumulating during your life,” he says. “We have to understand what the real objective is.

“All of us go through life transitions,” Moore continues. “We grow up and become adults, get jobs, get married, have kids, retire. So we ask a lot of questions up front regarding your feelings and emotions to understand the clients’ feelings and values toward those transitions and then use financial planning tools, techniques and products — insurance, budgeting, investments, estate planning, retirement planning, education planning and all the rest — to support their vision of the future.”

Moore charges either a set fee or $150 an hour to discover that vision and create a plan, and then has prod-ucts available to fulfill that plan if the client wishes.

Movement in the makingOne of the pioneers of determining

a customer’s real values and goals is George Kinder, who founded the Bos-ton-based Kinder Institute of Life Plan-ning in 1992.

“Really, I always worked with cli-ents this way from the very beginning,” says Kinder in a phone interview from his home in Hawaii. A certified pub-lic accountant and tax advisor, Kinder explains he found that his tax clients were nearly always eligible for more deductions than they realized. “The only way to find that out was to talk to them, to find out how they lived their

lives and who they were. It seemed to make sense to do that in financial plan-ning as well.”

In the late 1980s, he gave a presenta-tion called “The Human Side of Mon-ey” to a Financial Planning Association national conference in Washington, D.C., and “it was hugely popular. I was called back again and again and that surprised me since I wasn’t politically connected with the financial planning industry in any way.”

From those presentations, Kinder wrote his first book “The Seven Stag-es of Money Maturity: Understanding the Spirit and Value of Money in Your Life.”

“It was directed at the general pub-lic, but sold extremely well to financial planners,” he notes. “The best ones are personable, care about their clients and usually engage in deep conversations with them. But they didn’t know how to handle the emotional issues that came up. And some of those issues had major financial implications.”


The next step is a five-day intensive session, followed by six months of con-tact with a Kinder-trained mentor. The result is a designation of Certified Life Planner, a professional designation cre-ated by the institute.

Key questionsLinda Rudd, who holds a Certified

Financial Planner (CFP) designation started her career as a financial advi-sor with a local bank. Now a mortgage planner with Legacy Mutual Mortgage, she took the Kinder basic life planning course years ago.

“One of the exercises we did in that training did have an impact on my career,” she says. “They put us through the exercise of the three questions and I still use it in training sessions I conduct

30 MARCH 12, 2010 SAN ANTONIO BUSINESS JOURNAL www.sanantoniobusinessjournal.comPERSONAL FINANCE: WEALTH MANAGEMENT & TAX PLANNING

VALUES: ‘Life planning’ guru helps move advisors’ focus on clients beyond numbers

have criticized this approach as coming dan-gerously close to psychotherapy, a charge Kinder refutes.

“Those listening skills are much the same skill sets as basic counseling, but that’s just the listening part,” he says. “We don’t train people or encourage them to go into child-hood histories, for instance, or motivation for emotional changes. We train in how to listen for what the client really wants to do with life and how to take that and design a fi nancial plan around it. That’s the real purpose of what we do.

“I recall a recent study,” Kinder adds, “that showed a fi nancial planner took an average of 82 seconds listening to clients before going to the planning stage. We’re the fi rst organi-zation to say that’s woe-fully inadequate.”

Brodzik adds that she sees this method of fi nancial planning gaining acceptance. “Our business has doubled over the last couple of years,” she says. “People are either becoming more open or the word is getting out there. The demand for this kind of service is snow-balling.”

Relationship sellingIn his 31-year career, Richard Smith Jr.,

a Certifi ed Life Underwriter (CFU) and Chartered Financial Consultant (ChFC), and currently a principal with Chapman

Schewe Benefi ts Consult-ing, has approached fi -nancial planning from the insurance side. While he says he doesn’t prepare formal written plans — (“I choose to give the advice, the training and the teach-ing without a fee, so I’m not required to produce a book.”) — he says a num-ber of fi nancial professions have moved toward what he calls “counselor sell-ing.”

“What do you want to ac-complish? Somebody has to ask those questions,” Smith says. “I have to know what you want to do, where are you going in your life and how I can help get you there faster. I’m Mapquest. I’m going to give you direc-tions based on where you want to go. There’s a fast way, a scenic way and an ‘I’ll get to it tomorrow’ way. The way you tell me how you want to do it prioritizes where we fi ll up with gas, and that’s when the spreadsheets, the calcula-tions and the numbers come into play.

“It is easy to buy stuff, either by your-self, or online or going to someone’s offi ce,” Smith explains. “But plain old common horse sense is still the way of counselor sell-ing. Once you have a relationship with a client, if you maintain that relationship, it is a beautiful thing. If George Kinder is

working on that relationship and taking it deeper, God bless him. Is the industry headed in that direction? I think all busi-ness fl ourishes when there is relationship selling. People just want to work with peo-ple they know and trust.”

Kirk Francis, president and CEO of Cross Financial Services, is from the in-vestment world, previously holding vice president positions with both PaineWeb-ber and Dean Witter Reynolds before

creating his own local fi rm. Francis, hold-ing both CFP and Accredited Investment Fiduciary (AIF) designations, maintains fi nancial planning has always been rela-tionship-oriented.

The fact is, Francis says, the entire fi -nancial planning concept came out of a number of related fi elds, including CPAs — who “deal with today and yesterday and what’s most tax-effi cient,” he notes — as well as stockbrokers, banks and insurance agents who want a client to have more assets to be managed. But, he explains, as all those industries matured and started offering more products, they overlapped and became interlaced.

“So somebody has to coordinate all of it and, in the past, it always has been you, personally, as the client,” Francis says. “But now things have gotten so complex and there are so many moving parts, peo-ple who don’t want to do that want some-body to help them.

“The picture I use in seminars is a leaf hitting a pond and the ripples from that going out. Every decision you make is an-other leaf, and when you have fi ve or six or 10 leaves hitting, the ripples overlap and all affect one another.”

Even while a strict defi nition of the pro-fession is still emerging, the concept of fi -nancial planners is the result, he believes. Planners, to be effective, need to know their client’s needs and values.

“George Kinder was probably the fi rst to formalize it and label it, but I don’t think, in practice, it is that much different than the standards of practice that the Certifi ed Financial Planner board tells you that you have to have right now,” Francis says.

“This way of treating clients has been 30 years in the making,” he adds. “In the beginning, we only had products and only had commissions to do this kind of work. But, because we’ve demanded that it be different, and we’ve separated products and advice, we’ve grown so we can effec-tively communicate that it is not about the sales. It’s about the client and the trust re-lationship you have with that client. It has always been that way.”

RICHARD ERICKSON is a San Antonio free-lance writer.

FROM PAGE 22

JIM LOCHHEAD / SAN ANTONIO BUSINESS JOURNALKirk Francis says Kinder’s philosophy is not much different than the Certifi ed Financial Planner board’s current standards of practice.

Kinder






















FROM PAGE 22


Kinder

for various local groups. It’s a paradigm shift for most people.”

Briefly, the “three questions,” what Kinder calls “the starting points,” are:


• You found out you have five to 10 years to live. How will you change your life?


“The answer (to the third question) is usually not that I wish I’d had one more car or another vacation home,” Rudd says. “It’s looking backward at what you missed in your life. That’s not usu-ally a materialistic thing, but a quality of life or the value of a relationship.

“I think that is what this new move-ment is trying to harmonize. You find what is important to you from a qual-ity-of-life standpoint, you quantify it in dollars and then you try to bring the two together,” she adds. “I think if more mortgage planners had embraced this type of approach, we would not have the mortgage debacle we’ve had. If they cared about you and just didn’t want to close the deal and make money,

all of those homeowners might not be facing foreclosure.”

Challenging status quoAccording to Eva Brodzik, Kinder

Institute’s director of business develop-ment — who is based in Kansas City — the basic approach to life planning is to go much deeper into the client’s motivations than has normally been the case.

“Life planning uses conversation skills and much more open-ended ques-tions,” she explains. “In that way, it gives the client permission to talk about things that might never come out. Peo-ple are not used to being asked those questions, and it takes them through the process of discovery. You find where those beliefs come from so you know what you are really dealing with.”

Some more traditional financial plan-ners have criticized this approach as coming dangerously close to psycho-therapy, a charge Kinder refutes.

“Those listening skills are much the same skill sets as basic counseling, but that’s just the listening part,” he says. “We don’t train people or encourage them to go into childhood histories, for

JIM LOCHHEAD / SAN ANTONIO BUSINESS JOURNAL

Kirk Francis says Kinder’s philosophy is not much different than the certifi ed Finan-cial Planner board’s current standards of practice.






















FROM PAGE 22


Kinder






















FROM PAGE 22


Kinder

instance, or motivation for emotional changes. We train in how to listen for what the client really wants to do with life and how to take that and design a financial plan around it. That’s the real purpose of what we do.

“I recall a recent study,” Kinder adds, “that showed a finan-cial planner took an average of 82 seconds listening to clients before going to the planning stage. We’re the first organization to say that’s woe-fully inadequate.”

Brodzik adds that she sees this method of financial planning gaining acceptance. “Our business has doubled over the last couple of years,” she says. “People are either becoming more open or the word is getting out there. The demand for this kind of service is snow-balling.”

Relationship sellingIn his 31-year career, Richard Smith

Jr., a Certified Life Underwriter (CFU) and Chartered Financial Consultant (ChFC), and currently a principal with Chapman Schewe Benefits Consulting, has approached financial planning from the insurance side. While he says he doesn’t prepare formal written plans — (“I choose to give the advice, the train-ing and the teaching without a fee, so I’m not required to produce a book.”) — he says a number of financial pro-fessions have moved toward what he calls “counselor selling.”

“What do you want to accomplish? Somebody has to ask those questions,” Smith says. “I have to know what you want to do, where are you going in your

life and how I can help get you there faster. I’m Mapquest. I’m going to give you directions based on where you want to go. There’s a fast way, a scenic way and an ‘I’ll get to it tomorrow’ way. The way you tell me how you want to do it prioritizes where we fill up with gas, and that’s when the spreadsheets, the calculations and the numbers come into play.

“It is easy to buy stuff, either by your-self, or online or going to someone’s office,” Smith explains. “But plain old common horse sense is still the way of counselor selling. Once you have a relationship with a client, if you main-tain that relationship, it is a beautiful thing. If George Kinder is working on that relationship and taking it deeper, God bless him. Is the industry headed in that direction? I think all business flourishes when there is relationship selling. People just want to work with people they know and trust.”

Kirk Francis, president and CEO of Cross Financial Services, is from the investment world, previously holding vice president positions with both Pain-eWebber and Dean Witter Reynolds before creating his own local firm. Francis, holding both CFP and Accredited Investment Fiduciary (AIF) designations, maintains financial plan-ning has always been relationship- oriented.

The fact is, Francis says, the entire financial planning concept came out of a number of related fields, including CPAs — who “deal with today and yes-terday and what’s most tax-efficient,” he notes — as well as stockbrokers, banks and insurance agents who want a client to have more assets to be man-aged. But, he explains, as all those

industries matured and started offering more products, they overlapped and became interlaced.

“So somebody has to coordinate all of it and, in the past, it always has been you, personally, as the client,” Francis says. “But now things have gotten so complex and there are so many moving parts, people who don’t want to do that want somebody to help them.

“The picture I use in seminars is a leaf hitting a pond and the ripples from that going out. Every decision you make is another leaf, and when you have five or six or 10 leaves hitting, the ripples overlap and all affect one another.”

Even while a strict definition of the profession is still emerging, the con-cept of financial planners is the result, he believes. Planners, to be effective, need to know their client’s needs and values.

“George Kinder was probably the first to formalize it and label it, but I don’t think, in practice, it is that much different than the standards of practice that the Certified Financial Planner board tells you that you have to have right now,” Francis says.

“This way of treating clients has been 30 years in the making,” he adds. “In the beginning, we only had prod-ucts and only had commissions to do this kind of work. But, because we’ve demanded that it be different, and we’ve separated products and advice, we’ve grown so we can effectively communi-cate that it is not about the sales. It’s about the client and the trust relation-ship you have with that client. It has always been that way.”

Richard Erickson is a San Antonio freelance writer.

Reprinted for web use with permission from the San Antonio Business Journal. ©2010, all rights reserved. Reprinted by Scoop ReprintSource 1-800-767-3263.

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