In today’s world, clients expect more than just a focus on investments when seeking out wealth planners. They want advisors who take the time to understand their whole life, including major life events and personal aspirations beyond finances.

Holistic financial planning meets this demand by incorporating a client’s total life and financial circumstances into their plan. The purpose is to go beyond helping clients achieve financial goals by supporting them in living a more meaningful life.

The Holistic Planning Approach

Holistic planners take a top-down approach to planning. All their recommendations will be based on the client’s short- and long-term life goals. They focus not just on what a client can afford to do today, but also help them visualize their future goals and where they see themselves in the future.

But what does that look like in practice? Fidelity’s “Three Principles of Holistic Wealth Planning” identifies the key principles to a holistic wealth planning approach:

1. Continuous: Holistic planners reassess or discuss reassessing their client’s wealth plans at least once annually.

2. Personal: Holistic wealth planners are tremendously at ease discussing with their clients the multiple but unique life event topics important to them, including the toughest ones like death and physical health.

3. Comprehensive: Holistic wealth planners offer over 10 in-house advisory services in order to serve client’s total lives.

These principles provide a basic roadmap to success that financial professionals can use as they develop their holistic financial planning process.

What Services Do Holistic Financial Planners Offer?

Holistic financial planners cover a range of vital areas. Their service offerings may include investment management, cash flow analysis, retirement planning, tax planning, risk management, budgeting, saving for short- and long-term financial goals, education planning, end-of-life planning, charitable giving, and estate planning. To ensure that their firm has a solution for the entire holistic spectrum, a financial advisor may bring on additional financial professionals with complementary expertise and/or build out their network.

It’s important to recognize that there’s no universal framework for a holistic financial plan. When you adopt a holistic approach, you craft personalized plans that directly align with each client’s unique goals and principles. Depending on a client’s specific requirements, their holistic financial plan may encompass some or all of the elements mentioned above. By tailoring your approach in this way, you empower your clients to take charge of their financial journey in a manner that reflects their individual aspirations and values.

Preparing Your Firm for Holistic Financial Planning

Embracing a holistic approach to planning can lead to significant transformations for your clients. However, deciding that you want to start holistic planning is just the beginning. It’s essential that your team, processes, and technology align seamlessly to support this comprehensive service. If you want to begin offering this service to your clients, begin by addressing these four key areas.

1. Address Technology Use

When diving into holistic financial planning, your choice of technology sets the stage for your service quality and should be your first consideration. Since holistic planning demands more time, leveraging your technology effectively becomes crucial for boosting efficiency and profitability. Look for technology that allows you to leverage integrations, promote the use of client portals, create comprehensive plans, and establish workflows.

2. Prepare Firm Processes

After you have conducted your technology audit, your next step is to focus on your firm’s internal processes. Everyone on staff needs to be on board with offering holistic planning and creating workflows, templates, and standards with room for personalization. When you look at your firm’s processes, be sure to consider your fee structure, how you can empower support staff, whether you need to expand your areas of expertise in order to offer holistic planning, and how you can master onboarding and data collection.

3. Be Ready to Go Deeper with Clients

In holistic financial planning, the focus extends beyond finances to delve into a client’s emotions, values, and sources of meaning in life. They may be conversations you’re having today with topics that include premarital planning, divorce, significant health issues, and other potentially uncomfortable topics. Prepare yourself to skillfully navigate tough conversations by gaining a solid understanding of your existing clients, exploring the right questions to ask to understand client values, and reviewing resources that can help guide you through tough conversations.

4. Develop and Execute Your Service Calendar

Holistic planning can seem daunting to you and your clients, but it doesn’t need to be created all at once. A service calendar will help you clearly outline the timeline for developing a holistic plan that considers all aspects of your clients’ lives and helps them achieve their goals. Your service calendar should cover different topics by quarter and/or year, address all aspects of a client’s life, and plan for your entire relationship. In addition, be sure to stay up to date on legislation and current events so that you can work any necessary changes into your calendar.

Embrace Holistic Financial Planning

Incorporating holistic financial planning has been proven successful for firms seeking to meet the expectations of today’s clients and develop additional revenue streams. Our research shows holistic planners can charge a premium for their services and report greater client successes.¹

Prepare your firm for future growth and success by embracing holistic financial planning. If you’re ready to get started, you can take a deeper dive into the four steps outlined above or view our infographic to review the steps in an easy-to-digest format. You can also get a step-by-step look at how one advisor is using technology to scale holistic planning in his firm to realize 600+% AUM growth.

Sources:

1. eMoney Leading with Planning Research, May 2022, Advisors n=360

DISCLAIMER: The eMoney Advisor Blog is meant as an educational and informative resource for financial professionals and individuals alike. It is not meant to be, and should not be taken as financial, legal, tax or other professional advice. Those seeking professional advice may do so by consulting with a professional advisor. eMoney Advisor will not be liable for any actions you may take based on the content of this blog.

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