There's a lot going on in the planning profession these days. In the practice management arena, advisers are talking about creating career tracks within their firms, abandoning the "pod" approach to organizing their service teams, and merging complementary planning firms to capture a bit more economy of scale. In the business development realm, fiduciary advisers are discussing ways to make the SEC's new disclosure language work to their advantage.

In investments, there's Harold Evensky's hub-and-satellite approach where you index the core portfolio and seek alpha on the margins, and I still hear a lot of discussion about Rob Arnott's latest proposal to create index portfolios where the allocations are based on each company's share of the economy rather than its market cap. In technology, advisers are adapting to web-based solutions in portfolio reporting and core planning. In compliance, we have the integration of procedures manuals and training materials as a way of addressing two issues with the same document--and, most recently, the very first web-based compliance service for smaller advisory firms.

But the real action, the subject that seems to trump all others in hallway conversations and in the responses I am getting from the Inside Information community, is in client services. More is happening there, more quickly, than anywhere else, and there is a real danger of being left behind if you aren't aware of the newest developments.

RETIREMENT: THE NEW TOUGH SELL

The revolution in client services has been lumped under the "life planning" moniker--a regrettable term that I coined back in the mid-1990s in a first effort to talk about how some advisers were making their services more personalized to their clients' lives. (Unfortunately, we don't yet have a better term, but I'm wide open to suggestions.) The best big-picture way to view life planning is to think of the origins of financial planning. Before there was financial planning, a professional would sit down with a client and explain how, upon the client's untimely demise, they could provide for the comfort of his family and heirs. This was never an easy sell, which is the real reason why life insurance commissions are so high.

Then, in the early 1970s, a few people began making a different proposal: instead of making your family and heirs financially comfortable at your death, let's make you financially comfortable at your retirement. Presto! People were suddenly a lot more interested in talking with them.

Now fast forward to the present, when the very idea of retirement is looking a bit outmoded. Mitch Anthony, one of the leaders of the new life planning movement, has argued persuasively that it makes no sense

for people to take themselves totally out of all productive activities for the last 30 or 40 years of their lives. Too often, he says, retirees become "masters of the 19th hole"--meaning the bar in the clubhouse.

Baby boomers apparently agree. In an excellent presentation at the FPA Convention in San Diego, Peter Lindquist, author of Solving the Retirement Puzzle, talked about six recent surveys which all show that anywhere from two-thirds to 85% of baby boomers intend to work at least part-time during their retirement years.

PLANNING FOR RIGHT NOW

As the retirement goal becomes outmoded, a handful of leading-edge advisers are moving the focus one more large step back--from retirement to planning for now. The difference between life planning and the traditional retirement planning model is that life planning focuses not on death or retirement, but on improving the client's current situation. How can I, the financial planner, help you recover and achieve your most cherished life goals and dreams? How can I help you live a life of fulfillment, a life where you are doing what you were born to do, what you really enjoy doing?

This shift in the timeline can make your services exponentially more attractive to prospective clients. Why? Look around you at all the people caught up in the rat race, working at jobs they regard as drudgery--living, in Thoreau's remarkable phrase, "lives of quiet desperation." Even those who enjoy great prosperity are discovering a vacuum at the core--the fact that more stuff doesn't equate with more happiness and fulfillment.

How do you provide this service? Much of the actual work involves the very things you're already doing: organizing peoples' financial affairs, creating a discipline and order for investing, applying creative technical solutions to individual challenges. The difference is that you're working toward more precise, personalized goals--toward what Sacramento, Calif., planner Cynthia Meyers calls "blossoming as a person."

The first step is to add some additional questions to the initial client meeting, designed to help clients uncover what's missing in their lives. I've coined another phrase for this increasingly sophisticated array of questions--I call them "psychware"--and the good news is that a set of rela-tively standardized psychware tools are finding their way to the market, from Anthony's Financial Life Planning Institute (www.flpinc.com); from George Kinder's Kinder Institute (www.kinderinstitute.com); from Carol Anderson's Money Quotient (www.moneyquotient.com); and from Hugh Massie's Financial DNA (www.financialdna.biz).

Perhaps the most famous psychware tools are Kinder's "three questions," which go something like this:

• If you had all the money you needed, if money were no object, what would you do differently than you're doing right now?
• If a doctor said that you had just three years to live, what would you do differently than you're doing right now?
• If you discovered that you had just one more day to live, what would be your biggest regret?

Of course, it's quite common for people to uncover what their biggest regret would be, and then realize that they are spending zero time addressing that important issue. In some cases, they will fantasize about a lifestyle they could live if the money were there, and then the adviser can give them the good news: those goals can be met with your current finances.

THE POWER OF NAGGING

An important side benefit of this process is that it addresses what Dallas planner Guy Cumbie has called the "leap of faith" issue with financial planning services. When clients come to you for financial help, chances are they won't know whether you did a great job for them until five or 10 years have passed--sometimes more. Meanwhile, they're paying you on faith that your recommendations are helpful and relevant. (And we wonder why so many pretenders and charlatans thrive in the planning ecology!)

But if you apply a range of psychware tools, and help the client uncover the dreams and personal goals that she has buried for most of her adult life, and if she walks out of that first session as one of the top one-tenth of one percent of all humanity, a person who consciously recognizes what she wants out of life, that goes a long way toward justifying your fee--right there in the first interview!

Having expertise in the complex investment/tax/business environment makes you well qualified to help people chart a realistic course toward these very personal goals. But in addition to the traditional planning tools, life planners add another service--one that exponentially increases the power of the planner/client relationship. You could label it either "coaching" or "nagging."

This service addresses one of the most interesting discoveries in the life planning world: the fact that virtually any seemingly impossible goal can be achieved if the client works on it a little bit each day. The trouble is, in this day and age, everybody is bombarded by thousands of other competing agendas: by advertisements telling them that they will achieve fulfillment if they buy a hundred different products and services, by friends and family and the work on their desk, which is always filled up no matter how hard they try to finish it. A key life planning insight is that nobody, anywhere, is selfish enough to put his or her own agenda ahead of all those others.

And so the coaching--or nagging--service is really very simple. Clients entrust their most cherished goals to you, and you remind them of these personal goals with just as much--or more, if you're really good--force as all those other agendas roaring at them from every other direction. You hold your clients accountable for making progress, and you will not let up until they put their own agenda somewhere near the top five on their list of things to do, each and every day.

In many cases, the goal will be to move to a less stressful, more fulfilling job. The best way I've ever heard this phrased was when Jim Johnson, who practices in Sacramento, Calif., told me: "A lot of times I help my clients move from a crappy high-paying job to a fulfilling crappy-paying job." That, I think, captures the idea of the new retirement, where the investment portfolio's goal is not to secede from the workplace, but to make it possible for the client to scale back, remove stress, take time off and do things he or she finds enjoyable and fulfilling--a calling in life you would never want to retire from completely.

As I say in my speeches to financial planning groups, I think this is all leading toward a day when, if people see somebody living a happy, rewarding and fulfilling life, the first question they will ask is: "Who is your financial planner?"

Bob Veres is publisher of Inside Information (www.bobveres.com), an information service that helps planners stay on top of everything and achieve better results for their clients and themselves. Send feedback to bobveres@yahoo.com.

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