5 Tips to Remove Stress From Your Finances – Tip 5- Hire, and Know When to Fire, An Advisor

Hi, Matt Blocki with EWA. Today we are talking about five tips to remove stress out of your finances. Our fifth tip for taking stress out of your financial life is working with an advisor. Now, if you work with the wrong advisor, it may bring more stress into your life.

If they’re trying to sell you a product every meeting, if they’re trying to push some everything meeting. But we found working with a good advisor should not be a focus on the best returns or beating the market.

The biggest focus should be about adding value to you and your family. And a couple shortlist to that is choosing an advisor that understands your priorities, understands your values, understands what makes you tick, understands what’s most important to you and your situation so well that when there’s competing goals, if there’s not enough money to live freely on a budget right now and also fully fund undergrad and postgrad for your kids and also leave an inheritance and also be financially independent by 60.

And I’m just using this as examples. Advisor understands you so well that they’re able to help you navigate a negotiation system between spouses, between family, and also between yourself with recalibrating your plan and making sure that the most important things are getting hit.

Because in the ideal world you do everything and you take every vacation possible. But in the reality with inflation where it is, understanding priorities is key. And making sure you have an advisor that’s able to calibrate and work with you and navigate and steer you back on course is a top thing to look for.

The second thing, obviously this is just table stakes, but someone that listens, the only way to understand is to really listen. And then someone that really focuses on advice. I found most of our clients, we go through these drawn out agendas.

In reality when we ask for feedback, our clients really want us there when they have a really time sensitive or really stressful situation that they don’t want us to solve. But they want us to give advice, give us education, give optionality, give us what is the resulting impact if we make these decisions in our financial plan?

Everything we’ve planned for up to ten years. So advice is so key to choosing the right advisor. And the right advisor should not waste your time. You should never meet to meet. Your advisor should be doing everything possible to save time off your plate.

And not just meet to meet, but work as a CFO. You’re the CEO, advisor, the CFO, taking all of that financial stuff off your plate, but still reporting to you and understanding that you make the final decisions for your family and for your financial plan.

Other thing is they should improve your quality of life, provide introductions to other professionals, and quarterback everything. So from tax planning to estate planning to maybe starting a business, selling a business, the list goes on and on is being the quarterback and understanding ultimately what the top priorities are.

Thanks for watching our five tips on how to remove stress out of your financial life. And we welcome any questions that you have.