Not Just Financial Planning - ICONIC Financial Planning.
By J.R. Robinson, Owner/Founder
There is no paucity of financial planning firms that say they do financial planning. Most just want to manage client investment portfolios and merely pay lip service to the non-investment elements. FPH is a true financial planning shop. In fact, we do not accept clients who are solely interested in investment management.
That is not to say that portfolio management is not important. It is, but in our experience, there is tremendous opportunity to add tangible value by pointing out the mistakes, oversights and opportunities hidden among the non-investment elements of our clients financial lives. There is so much low-hanging fruit in tax planning, estate planning insurance risk management, and other non-portfolio management areas.
The purpose of this essay is to articulate the factors that make Financial Planning Hawaii and Fee-Only Planning Hawaii stand out in a crowed sea of "advicers." It should also help readers understand how the expertise and services we provide should help us not only survive, but thrive as AI expands in to the personal finance space.
Deep-Dive Information Gathering Paired with Hand-Crafted Recommendations
Even among other pure-play financial planning shops, we stand apart. In contrast to most of our peers, we do not produce computer-generated financial plans. As I have shared in other posts and videos, the enormous amount of time we spend gathering information with our clients is unique. We understand that consumers don't know what they don't know, and it is our job to help raise their awareness. Many of the 20-30+ findings and recommendations we typically deliver in our initial planning reviews go far beyond the generic guidance that planning software and AI reviews tend to produce. All of our plans are written by hand with no assist from Chat GPT.
A Platform that Grows with You and Keeps Your Plan Current Through Time
We also understand and appreciate that financial planning reviews are often outdated after just a few years. Accounts change, jobs change, family situations change, etc. To solve for obsolescence, we give all clients a platform that allows them to centralize, organize, monitor and maintain all aspects of their financial lives over time. While much of the data in our original planning review will eventually be dated, the platform effectively helps the original plan stay current.
Ongoing Education and Engagement
Our interactions with our clients over time are also unique. We do not call our clients to set up annual or semiannual reviews as most of our peers do. We are not your dentist. Instead, we inform our clients from the outset that we are working for them all the time and that we are available to meet with them as often as they wish and on their schedules. Consistent with this theme we provide our clients with a service calendar that maps out important tasks for them and us to do throughout the year.
To keep our clients engaged and educated on an ongoing basis, I publish a distinctly charismatic newsletter called Nest Egg News. Each issue features 10-15 articles on a broad range of planning topics. The articles are presented in a format that makes it easy for readers to quickly decide which articles may be most relevant. The articles are often humorous or edgy to make them more engaging. This added “personality” is reflected in the our high engagement numbers and 70-80% open rate. Nest Egg News is an integral part of how we keep our clients informed of important planning-related developments and how we engage and educate our clients over time.
Domain Authority
With the rise of TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube "finfluencers," there is no shortage of content creators promoting themselves as experts in personal finance. As a financial planning professional, I believe that in order to give financial planning advice, it is critically important to truly be an expert in your field. While my background in economics at Williams College introduced me to the concepts that laid the foundation for our approach to investment management, to expand my knowledge base, I turned to writing research papers and articles.
Over the past quarter century, I have written ten papers that were accepted for publication in peer-reviewed academic and professional journals, including three award-winning contributions on retirement income sustainability. I have also published scores of articles and op-ed commentaries on a broad range of financial planning topics for other editor-reviewed financial news media outlets. As evidence of my domain authority, I was twice included on Investopedia’s list of the top 100 most influential financial advisors in the U.S., and my commentary has appeared in virtually every national financial news media outlet including The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Barron’s, MarketWatch, Investopedia, Nerd Wallet, U.S. News, Financial Planning, and many more.
Our Own Proprietary Retirement Saving and Spending Simulation Software
My research interest in retirement income sustainability also fueled the development of our own proprietary retirement simulation software – Nest Egg Guru. The application arose out of three papers I co-authored with professors from the University of Hawaii’s Shidler College of Business. The simulation methodology they introduced to me for our research efforts offered a solution to the well-documented flaws in the popular Monte Carlo simulation applications used by most of our industry peers. Nest Egg Guru is integrated into our website and is a powerful tool for making retirement planning tangible and understandable and for helping our clients more realistically assess their retirement saving and spending preparedness.
Other Differentiators
While many of our peers devote their energy to attracting high net worth (HNW) and ultra-high net worth (UHNW) clients, we fish in a different pond. Clients who enlist our services for comprehensive financial planning that includes ongoing portfolio management tend to fall into the “mid-market affluent” segment. This is loosely defined as individuals and families with investable assets of $1million-$5 million. Our tiered asset-based pricing model begins at .75% per year and steadily declines to just .10% above $5 million, and we do not accept new clients with more than $30 million in assets.
Our flat-fee planning clients tend to be younger DIY investors who enlist our services because they are seeking a professional assessment of their portfolio management strategies and they particularly value our expertise on the important non-investment elements of financial planning. These are generally one-time engagements. We are agnostic to the asset-based or flat-flee decision.
Consumers who are considering working with us should also know that we are structured to be a multi-generational family business. This is important because there is a major trend in our industry space is for financial planners in their 50s and older to sell their practices to private-equity backed RIAs as a succession plan. That will not happen with Financial Planning Hawaii and Fee-Only Planning Hawaii.
We are following the Hermes succession model. Most consumers recognize Hermes as an internantional luxury brand best known for its hand-crafted leather handbags. What many people don't know is that it has been a family business for more than 200 years. We are following Hermes' lead in both elite artisanship and multi-generational succession. Both Itaat and I are bringing the next generation of our families into FPH. It is our hope and expectation that our children and grandchildren will be providing elite, thoughtfully crafted financial planning guidance to your children and grandchildren.
A Final Word...
We do not sell investment or insurance products. We are an advice-only, fiduciary-always shop. We are intentionally different from other financial planning firms. In a word, we strive to be iconic.