The future is now

Commentary February 13, 2013 at 11:24 AM
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As a financial planner, you're as much an expert as you are an educator. You work tirelessly to provide your clients the proper education on investing and managing their money so they can achieve optimum results. The good news is, according to a recent article from the Wall Street Journal, more investors are jumping back into the fray after largely abandoning their investment practices while the financial crisis of the last few years ran its course. This can be attributed to the fiscal cliff deal, which restored confidence in political negotiations as well as in the foreseeable stability of the markets themselves. With individual investors returning to the stock market, now is a great time to get clients engaged in their retirement planning again.

Getting clients interested in investing, retirement planning and extended insurance plans isn't going to be easy. With nearly a decade of convincing themselves not to put their finances near anything that could even potentially pose a risk, most investors are going to need to be eased back into investing. Yet now is a great time to put more than they normally would into the pot.

Today's purchases, tomorrow's returns

Encourage your clients to think of today's purchases as tomorrow's returns, not only in terms of luxury material goods (iPads, smart phones, etc.) but also in terms of types of investments (stocks, annuities, and so on). Investors are starting to recognize that the time of market stagnation is largely over, and they're dipping their toes in and realizing that they can begin to expect returns on their investments once again. For financial advisors, this means it's time to get investors to stop thinking in terms of what their money can do for them today, and get them back into the mindset of figuring out what it can do for them a few decades down the road.

As both an advisor and educator, it's important to help bring your clients out of the mentality reinforced by years of economic turmoil and uncertainty of "I can't trust my money to work for me in the way I need it to" and back into the mindset of investing for their futures. The future does, in fact, still exist for investors, and it's looking brighter by the day.

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