Your success is crucial. It enriches more than your life, it affects the lives of your clients, their spouse, children and grandchildren. Your work adds vitality to the entire community. Your failure, should that happen, affects us all.
To help you succeed I've created a planning process that translates complex financial concepts into graceful illustrations. The process found in the following chapters will enable you to assess clients' financial condition and bare hidden aspects of their financial lives—that, if left unattended, may encumber or even ruin their plans. Bringing positions, risks and purposes into focus helps you to see new opportunities, avoid hazards, and invigorate decisions. Soon you will be thinking like an elite planner—and not just a journeyman, but like an experienced captain.
A fine sailing vessel with splendid lines and gleaming sails offers a stylish metaphor for people's financial life. You are the captain, the one person above all others who is responsible for the safe arrival of your client's individual ship their chosen destination. Hazards that may thwart your purpose are depicted as sudden shifts in the weather, raging seas, or submerged obstacles like boulders or reefs. No boating knowledge is required. Your mind's eye can convey a ship across a fanciful ocean more readily than it could ever conceive the results hidden inside a multi-page financial plan. With a little practice you'll soon be seeing clients' financial lives in your mind's eye and able to analyze their situation in seconds. Plying this particular ocean will render a deeper understanding of people's financial life as it progresses through time, and through turbulent times. The metaphor of you as captain, the ship as your client's life, and the wind and waves as risks, is intended to elicit new insights, a clearer picture of people's financial lives and some previously unseen perils. This new found knowledge will embolden your decisions and add to your confidence. A confident new you making well-informed decisions will profoundly influence your client's destiny.
Armed with the knowledge contained in this book you will construct ships for your clients stout enough to weather the most alarming financial storms. They'll be fit and be able to convey your clients and their loved ones in comfort and safely to their dream destinations—including to a debt free education for their children and a successful retirement. As captain you'll prepare them for economic turmoil and chart safe passages. You'll build and preserve wealth, offload risk, create a lifetime of income, and witness your clients' success.
Along with building ships, you will create maps, Dynamic Maps, by which you will navigate around financial shoals and through floes of economic icebergs. In other words, you'll avoid the most devastating obstacles and mistakes that defeat lesser captains. You'll learn survival strategies in case one of your clients is driven onto a reef or is capsized by a financial tempest.
This is a book about financial journeys, lots of them, viewed through a fresh lens. We'll do more than assess investments; we'll consider the myriad of important choices that will ultimately lead your clients to a robust life and leave an enduring legacy. Our objective is for you to do all the above and to have fun doing it.
