For the last 15 years, I have served my clients as an estate planning attorney and a fiduciary financial advisor. Earlier this year, I founded The Wealth Solutions Network (WSN) to educate other attorneys about unresolved financial issues their clients often face and how they can be solved. For some members, this education and their personal goals may lead to them going deeper and actually incorporating my processes in their business.
My goal is to develop a national network of financially minded attorneys trained to look for ways to bring more value to their client relationships and improve the client's financial outcomes through integrating legal, financial, and tax guidance. I call these attorneys "Financial Advocates."
Imagine being a member of a collaborative community of attorneys trained on the methods of financial advisors, solving their client's financial problems confidently and competently by implementing proven processes through turnkey back-office support. Imagine tripling the value of each of your clients. This goal is the mission of WSN. I have done this and created the structure for others to do it.
Why Financial Advocacy is Needed
You may ask, "Why is this needed?". After all, isn't this the "financial advisor" role? As an estate planning attorney, you are routinely pestered by "financial advisors" seeking to build referral relationships. They seem to be plentiful. They are not. Especially when you are looking for true fiduciary advisors for your clients.
Simply, there is an overwhelming need for consumer financial guidance. I have spoken with hundreds of consumers across the county over the last few years and have seen first-hand how few of them are getting the guidance they need in these volatile times. This need is becoming greater all the time as the forces of commoditization and consolidation affect the financial services industry. This problem worsens over the next decade as fewer qualified persons enter these careers and experienced persons retire.
As a result, many consumers are not getting the guidance they need, and this will likely lead to tremendous preventable financial loss. We, attorneys, can help stop this financial loss by no longer abdicating our responsibility and relying on commissioned salespeople to provide the financial strategies our clients need.
What Estate Planning Attorneys Can Do to Help Consumers
My goal is to empower our profession to help prevent this unnecessary financial loss by creating an army of "financial advocates" - properly trained attorneys embracing leadership in their client's financial lives. My intention is to start a movement to change how estate planning firms everywhere fight the forces of commoditization and fee compression in their business and generate more revenue by stepping into the role of financial strategist and delivering better client outcomes.
Like many of you, I have seen the good, the bad, and the downright ugly from the financial industry. I decided to focus on the good and eliminate as much of the nasty as possible. I invested three years of my life captive inside the financial services industry and escaped to independence. Over the last 15 years, I've earned a Certified Financial Plannerâ„¢ designation and built four businesses to solve the financial problems my clients faced from a position of pure independence, free from product and institutional bias.
I'm now bringing that experience, my processes, and my resources to other attorneys through WSN. I am providing members with the tools, training, and team of experts I have curated. Membership empowers properly trained and licensed member-attorneys to triple their average client value. You do not need to invest 15 years of your life getting up to speed like I did. If you follow my process, you will be up to speed, generating positive return on your investment in 15 weeks or less. I guarantee it.
Many estate planning attorneys are familiar with the concepts of tax, investment, and insurance that are incidental to developing an estate plan. However, many feel the need for more significant expertise in these disciplines, often deferring to the clients' financial advisors instead of asserting themselves on behalf of the client.
Technology has evolved to the point where a properly trained attorney can provide solutions in these areas that only a few short years ago required years of experience and training. We have identified the technology and made it available to the members of WSN. We have developed the training and processes to help you deliver these solutions. As a result, you can now offer these complimentary services to your existing practice. These services can quickly add to the business's bottom line while improving client outcomes and building deeper relationships with your client base. This can be done without a significant financial investment or, as importantly, a significant investment of your time.
With the creation of the Wealth Solutions Network, we've developed, pioneered, and perfected a process that teaches attorneys how to serve their clients better, set themselves apart from the competition, and generate more revenue, 3x the average client value all through implementing proven processes to solve your client's most common financial problems.
Every estate planning law firm owner sits on a gold mine far deeper and broader than they realize. It doesn't require a considerable investment of time or money. I can show you how it will position you as the number one financial authority for your clients.
The current system is not working for the average consumer. Our mission is not just to fix what is not working for the consumers but to replace it with a new system altogether where the role of the estate planning attorney is to be the center of the conversation about preserving, protecting, and transferring their wealth. We empower the attorneys to advocate for the client's financial future.
The Need is Immediate
You probably have already seen situations where your clients are not getting the financial guidance they need. It is a problem that will worsen precisely when your clients need it the most. There are almost 73 million baby boomers. Ten thousand of them are retiring each day. Similar numbers turn 75 each day.
Currently, less than 300,000 financial advisors serve the public, and only 60% of those are fiduciary advisors. As a result, 99% of Americans don't even use a financial advisor. And even though there are very few financial advisors, there are projected to be even fewer, as 37% of existing financial advisors retire over the next ten years.
This inability to fill the consumers' need for guidance will happen when your clients and their trillions of dollars need it the most. Absent this guidance, the 401k generation risks losing billions of dollars. This trend puts the attorneys in a unique position to fill the gap. By becoming a member of the Wealth Solutions Network, we will empower you to close the gap.
The 401k generation controls $68 trillion, and they're facing unprecedented economic uncertainty in the future as this country deals with its debt and deficit. Add to that a declining workforce, the economic impact of global warming, the disruption caused by generative artificial intelligence, and the potential for massive economic displacement is too significant to ignore.
For years, the press has been talking about how the 401K generation would create an unprecedented transfer of wealth to their chosen heirs. Ask yourself, will those assets be transferred, or will they be confiscated through taxation, market loss, and the cost of aging? You can help prevent much of this loss.
The New Standard of Care
When I started practicing estate planning law, it was the standard of care for the attorney to discuss credit shelter trusts, etc. when sitting across the table from a family with assets more than $600,000 to protect them from estate tax. Now, families that have millions of dollars in their IRA’s and 401k’s are getting no guidance whatsoever on the income tax that will be due when this fund is inherited by non-spousal beneficiaries. This does not need to be the case.
So, I ask you, are you ready to join a movement? Are you prepared to step up and become an advocate for your client's financial future, or will you continue to defer to commission-based salespeople of financial products, or worse, allow your clients to continue in ignorance?
We will help you get there through our proven Wealth Solutions Network three-step process, which we outline in this newsletter, along with the Six Pillars of Financial Advocacy, a framework we have developed to assist you in providing these services as part of your business. So, please read on and see if you feel the time is right to change the way that consumers are provided financial guidance and watch your revenues explode.
I hope to welcome you to our movement.
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