Education of a Financial Planner

Video Transcript

"Financial planners come in all shapes and sizes. Typically they are more left brain oriented people. In my case my dad was a engineer and you know, you talk about not having to be a rocket scientist, he was a rocket scientist. He was a personal friend of Warner Von Braun and worked on radar back in the day and you know so on and so forth. Mom was a hairdresser. And so I've got the left brain and the right brain going on. Now that makes it a little bit easier for me because I tend to be more task oriented, numbers oriented and numbers driven but at the same time you have to have the people skills. Because you just do. Because people they rather do business with somebody that smiles once in a while. You know they always have the joke they say about CPA's where you have to reach down and grab their wrist to find a pulse you know. And that's no fun. Right. Can we make this kind of stuff fun. You bet. It's way more fun knowing what's going on and having a plan and working on the plan then laboring in ignorance right. And superstition about what we ought to be doing about money and never talking about it. Yuk. But that was the family I grew up in. We never talked about money, mom never knew what dad made, she never got a driver's license. It was that old school, they met in nineteen thirty two in the depths of the depression. Never brought a dime in their whole lives blah blah blah. Right. And so I learned nothing about money. And had to go out and do it the hard way. And it's tough stuff so you get this education your life experiences when you were growing up alright, and a lot of people don't even need a financial planner. You know why, because they come from wealthy families that talked about money and taught them this stuff cause they knew it ok. And it's about how having a good relationship with money and paying attention to that stuff and putting it over here ok. And so if you are lucky enough to be in the top five percent in one of those families you may have learned something about that. Well what if you aren't. Well you get with somebody like me and you can learn this stuff over time and brick by brick you can start to put a financial paradigm in place that's going to get you pretty happy with your situation. You know I don't have any control over what bank of America does. I don't have any control over what Barney Frank does directly. But I do have control over how I'm going to deal with those things. Right, they are going to impact me right, but that education and that walk through life that we as financial planners have is a combination of the schooling, the formal education, but more importantly our life experiences and understanding that people that want financial plans ok, they don't have the kind of control that they are hoping they are going to have. We just give them a little bit more control and a little bit of understanding and peace with what does go on and say the serenity prayer. Let me change the things I know I can change, let me accept the things I can't change, and the wisdom to know the difference and you can be a lot happier about money. And that's the kind of education that we want to take out to people."