At the FPA Convention in Denver, I happened to run into a person I'll call The Producer. You may know him; The Producer was an important man in the profession back in the 1980s, serving on the IAFP board, often quoted in the trade press, sometimes by me, although it was a lot of work to clean up his language. We still kept in touch, but now you don't hear much about him.

I sat down next to him at the hotel bar, where I was ordering drinks for a few people at one of the tables. When I asked him how he was doing, he looked me up and down with heavy-lidded eyes.

"Congratulations," he said.

"On what?"

"Everybody is buying this mollyflubbing fiduciary crock of pinfeathers," he said, snorting into his drink. "Chirping willowleaves like you, who don't know a goldarned thing about this wiffling business, have managed to make it sound like a great idea."

"You don't think it is?" I ventured.

"It's the dumbest goldarned idea I've heard in all my years in this business."

"Coming from somebody with a life insurance background, that's really saying something."

The Producer held up his glass. "I call them like I see them."

THE 98% SOLUTION

"Okay," I said. "So tell me what's so wrong with everybody who gives advice putting the best interests of the customer first."

"For two percent of the population, I think it's a whistling great idea," he said. "But what about the other 98%?"

"I don't understand," I said.

"I knew that before you sat down. Tell me this: What kind of person gets up in the morning with the idea that he needs to go see one of those tweeting fee-only advisors?"

"People who understand that they aren't experts, and that with the help of a professional, they could be doing better," I said promptly. "People who understand the need to save and invest, who aren't doing it as well as they'd like. People who realize that their time is too valuable for them to do their financial stuff themselves when professionals could be doing it better and more efficiently for them."

"Exactly," The Producer said, as if I had made his point for him. He finished his drink quickly, laid the empty glass on the bar and turned to me. "And how many people that you know that fit that bunnyhopping description? What percentage of them has ever done what you just described?"

"Probably not the majority," I allowed after a few seconds of consideration.

The Producer snorted. The bartender poured him another drink.

"Maybe less than a third," I said, backtracking a little.

"Maybe closer to that fiddleheaded 2% figure I threw out earlier," he retorted. "Those are the easy ones. Anybody can sell advice to people like that, even those snorting fee-only advisors. A small number of people understand the importance of saving and investing, which means they tend to have more money than all the rest put together before they even go see a financial advisor. So it makes sense to charge them a fee on the assets they've been able to gather so far."

He leaned across the bar toward me. "But what about the rest?"

"What rest?"

"The people who haven't saved. The people who would never knock on the door of a financial advisor. The other 98% of people who, when I talk to them, the last thing on their mind is putting money aside for their future, because they don't believe it's possible and even if it were, they'd be scared to death of what the markets would do to them."

"What about them?" I said.

"They may not save and invest, but they buy stuff every bleeping day. So you have to structure the whole 'setting aside for the future' thing in a form that they understand, which is buying something. Maybe somebody like me can convince them to buy life insurance protection for their family, and maybe I can convince them to put money into the policy that will be there later, and if it's a really good day, maybe I can show them how, with an annuity, they can buy a thousand dollars worth of retirement income for less than their monthly car payment.

"And if they've totally lost faith in the markets, maybe I can show them a way to get back in the game without having to worry that the markets will flush down the toilet for the third time in recent memory. If I don't catch them in a weak moment," The Producer continued, downing his drink, "and convince them to buy something I'm paid to sell, they'll arrive at the future with nothing set aside."