Richard B. Wagner, JD, CFP®

It’s one of those “best of times, worst of times” times. Account balances dissipated; hopes and dreams mutated to reflect new realities. Many of us have gone through severe depression ourselves, questioning our skills, our relationships and our profession. Others of us are seriously questioning our career choices -or our career choices are questioning us as bottom lines disintegrate. As one friend noted in his travels across the country, “people are really hurting out there.” Even our Nazrudin conversations have mostly engaged our lack of responsibility for unfolding events as we share tales of client loyalty and understanding. To my eyes there has been surprisingly little conversation devoted to assessing our responsibilities, articulating lessons to be learned or speculating about the skills we might need going forth. The skills you might need going forth.

It seems to me that authentic professions use bad results profitably. Patients die. Physicians perform autopsies. When clients go to jail, lose businesses and emerge unhappily from disputes and lawsuits, lawyers use these occasions to reflect and rework. When structures collapse or the books don’t balance forensic explorers don’t stop until they know the reasons why. It seems to me that this should be the case with financial planners in this time and place. Unfortunately, it seems not. Rather, conversations about money, the money forces and money’s future together with the anticipatable role of the financial planning profession have a “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” quality.

It seems to me this is a time for looking at ourselves deeply and intensely, without window dressing. There are no reasons to wear hair shirts; we really did not cause this. Still there are things we might have done differently had we perceived ourselves differently. I suggest that we need a fundamental courage to consider the “what-ifs” and talk about them.

It seems I’ve been reading a lot about “our times” lately. For one, Obama’s election must surely mark a major inflection point for all sorts of things. For another, the financial crisis will be leaving its mark on history in some form. In addition, the miscellaneous crises facing our country and the world ought not be understated. Most of them have financial implications. Perhaps most importantly for our consideration, though, is that financial planning is coming of age at exactly the same time as major opportunities to assert our place in the universe are presenting themselves.

Throughout our history, financial planning has been conflicted between its financial services industry roots and its aspirations for becoming an authentic profession. Never has the divide been so plainly manifested as now. We simply cannot allow the financial services industry to pretend any longer that it is in control of the financial planning profession. Of course that means embracing fiduciary standards. That goes without saying. But it also means establishing a meaningful divide between the financial planning profession and industry while holding the financial services industry accountable for its shortcomings. Of course, it means dedicating ourselves to serving our clients first.

It also means looking at our functions and asking ourselves what our educations ought to include. I suspect this means hours and weeks and years of conversation and introspection. Hopefully, this can be done within the framework of continuing to establish and confirm financial planning as an authentic profession. It may ultimately require us to articulate unpopular perspectives around the reliability of pension plans and government benefits. It may even require us to question the role of money within our social infrastructure.

I suggest that financial planners are just about the only folks out there who deal with individuals and the long-term future simultaneously. Perhaps mental health professionals and pastors also do this as well, but the fact is we are the ones who look at our clients’ financial security with the long-term in mind, fully aware of all possibilities including the unpleasant ones. As we look at Martin Siesta’s figures for Medicare and Medicaid, don’t we know that these are promises that can’t be kept in current form? As we look at pension numbers, don’t we know that they are catastrophic? Don’t we know that current lifestyles are unsustainable for such large numbers for a variety of reasons? What do we do with this information?

Perhaps we can find new ways to communicate our insights. For example, is money what we think it is? Has it changed its nature and function over the past 60 to 100 years? If so, how can we communicate this? Can we help develop new systems? For example, I have been thinking more and more that money in the 21st century more closely resembles public utility functions than the “storehouse of value” functions typically included in definitions of money. Public utility versus wealth. That could be an interesting conversation. If that is the case, the nature of money conversations probably changes as we consider the implications for markets, the nature of “work” and rights to access money. What about complementary currencies? Can there be different rules for international trading currencies and localized forms of reciprocity and exchange?

What about our fundamental mission as financial planners? Have we really had sufficient conversation about this? Are we salesmen? Do we represent the financial services industry or are we fundamentally devoted to our clients? Or are we 21st-century pastors of a secular faith? Are we futurists? Scenario planners? Guides? Or integrators? If these are appropriate roles for financial planners how might we have handled the last four years differently?

This is a time for looking inward and asking ourselves some tough questions. I suspect that the answers we reach over the next few years will determine the future of the financial planning profession.

© 2008 Richard Wagner. Reprinted with permission.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 7th, 2008 at 3:04 pm and is filed under Dick Wagner. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.