Follow-Up Client Meeting

Have you ever wondered how Covisum President and Founder, Joe Elsasser, CFP^® uses the software in his own financial planning practice? In this new video series, Joe shares his process and how he uses the Covisum software suite to add value in a variety of different client meetings. In this video blog post, Joe walks us through how he uses the software in his follow-up client meeting to test possible solutions for the client's specific situation.

Transcript

In our process here in Omaha, our second meeting—we call it a confirmation meeting—and the primary purpose of the confirmation meeting is to ensure that we have the client's goals and available resources or assets all right in our system. So, we want to be basically confirming everything that we learned in our initial meeting and everything that we gathered from the documents they provided.

Now, while we're doing that confirmation, we also want to be testing some of the potential solutions. I'll give you one great example. And that is a Social Security delay. There are some people who flat out never, ever will be comfortable with both members of a couple delaying till age 70. The uncertainty of doing so in light of the uncertainty in the Social Security system and the uncertainty in life expectancy is just too much for them. So, it does them no good if we come back to them with a recommendation that they both delay until 70, because they simply won't implement it.

Instead, what we need to be doing is identifying whether or not they can stomach the best decision, and if they can't stomach the best decision as we can identify it with Social Security Timing^®, then what is the best decision that they can stomach? And how do we move them towards the best decision that they can actually implement?

That's really the purpose of the confirmation meeting: to lay out those initial findings. Once you've confirmed all the facts, lay out the initial findings and make sure that they're comfortable with those potential solutions, because those solutions form the groundwork of what will become the financial plan and the final deliverable in the next meeting.

Build Your Custom Tech Stack 

You have all of the tools to alleviate client concerns and make sure they feel prepared for the next chapter of their lives with a comprehensive retirement investment strategy. Show them what their retirement could look like with an overview in Income InSight^® or dive into specifics with Social Security Timing^®, Tax Clarity^®, and SmartRisk™.