Janney's Retirement Evaluator Answers Clients' Most Common Question

The approach is to avoid providing one-size-fits-all solutions and instead give advisors the tools to follow an efficient process to flexibly meet individual client needs.

For the Evaluator, the process includes having advisors sit down in person with clients to work through the entire presentation from page one, "collecting data as they go along; the calculations happen, and then they can review the findings together."

Schamis says some data can be entered beforehand via questionnaires, and the advisor can provide clients a printed report, though not one of those "160-page coffee-table book" financial plans that only serve to "confuse clients."

A non-tech-savvy advisor "can do it across the kitchen table with a bound report," Schamis says, while more tech-savvy advisors can go through the process with clients using web or video conferencing tools such as WebX "to plug people in from different locations," a process that Schamis' wealth planning team can facilitate.

Schamis says the most common implementation of the Retirement Income Evaluator is at the outset of the relationship with the client to help "set a baseline." However, Schamis' team recommends that advisors revisit the Evaluator with clients once or more a year to refresh the assumptions and to accommodate any client life changes.

Schamis says that what he's heard from advisors using the Evaluator is that the 'Wow!' factor for the clients is the moment after the data gathering process is complete, when the client's goals are listed and accurately predicted retirement date is shown with income sources "and you bring up a screen showing what your retirement looks like." It's that moment when a screen "pops up and shows somebody their retirement—that's when it becomes concrete for them."

Schamis, a CFP who was named to the CFP Board of Directors in December 2017, was a financial advisor himself (with Morgan Stanley) early in his career, and he says that experience has informed his career serving advisors since, including 11 years at Vanguard. Serving in an operations capacity in the back office, and in technology and development, has helped him see the "entire life cycle" of a client-advisor relationship.

That's also helped him see that the "real beauty of planning" is that it "fundamentally changes the conversation that we have with clients from one around product and sales ideas" to one that focuses on clients and their goals and how to implement solutions to achieve those goals.

"Far too often," he says, "we get so focused on the technology as the end solution that we miss the conversation, this interplay of people around what we're trying to accomplish."