Ken Moraif  

Hello everyone, and welcome back to the Retirement Planners of America podcast where we try to have more fun than a human being should be allowed to have when talking about all of this financial stuff. And this episode, we have a very exciting topic which is near and dear to my heart, which is how to choose a good financial planner. And you know, just like in marriage, maybe the most important decision you make is, you know, second to your spouse. Of course, spouses are always first, but second most important decision you ever make could be who you choose as your financial planner. So we’re going to give you some ideas on how to do that. And so I’m gonna start the conversation here with Jeromy. Jeromy, how you doing?

Jeremy Thornton  

I am fantastic. Ken, how about yourself? Could

Ken Moraif  

not be better? Love it. Let’s do it.

Jeremy Thornton  

Awesome. Very good. Okay, so, financial planner, yes, what is a financial planner? Wow.

Ken Moraif  

Hadn’t expected that question. It was not in the script. That’s right. I’m throwing a curve ball. What I perceive to be a financial planner, at least from our perspective, yes, okay, because we work with people who are retired or who are retiring soon, I would say that a financial planner is someone whose goal is to help you, help you, have your money last as long as you do, okay? You know where the goal is that I want to live the lifestyle that I want. I want to be able to spend the money as needed to do that, and I don’t run out during my lifetime. So for me, that is a definition of a financial planner, okay?

Jeremy Thornton  

And I’m sure lots of different firms and different companies will have their own kind of definition definition for that, but it kind of want to set that out,

Ken Moraif  

but thanks for the curve ball. I appreciate that. Yeah, yeah. Listen, I

Jeremy Thornton  

was gonna keep it on your toes, right. Okay, so I think, I think one of the really important things is knowing what your goals are for a financial planner, and kind of aligning yourself to what that potential person can provide for you. So what can you say on qualifications? What qualifications should a financial planner have in our eyes?

Ken Moraif  

Well, certainly they should be. You know, you should ask these questions about their education. You know, what’s your educational background? You also want to know any certifications that they have. Are they CFP or, you know, whatever, what’s CFP, oh, I’m sorry, you’re right. Certified Financial Planner, okay. Are they see, chartered retirement planning consultant, CRPC, I was get tripped off over that. All of the advisors in our firm are CRPC, which means that they are trained all of them, or they are in the process of getting that. I should say, if we have a new one, they may not be that, but we think that’s a very important designation also, again, because of who we work with, yes, that they’ve been trained and certified in the areas of retirement planning and the associated things that are important for that. So in our in our world, CRPC is a very, very important designation as well. So ask them if they are what their designations are, and get a feel for where their focus is.

Jeremy Thornton  

Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so I’m shopping around, and I am looking for a financial planner. One thing that we should take into consideration is, Okay, what if something happens to you as a financial planner, not a threat, not a threat, but what if something happens to you, if you become unable to well, let’s say you retire. Retire, never what, what is your plan? Or you should ask, what is your plan? For me in that

Ken Moraif  

case, yeah, success is important, right? Succession, yes. So, yeah, that’s extremely important. You know, I meet with a lot of people that you know their current financial advisor is in their 60s. So that’s a very, very good question to ask. You know, what happens if you die? What happens if you get disabled? What happens if you retire? You know, what’s going to happen to this firm? And you know, one of the things that is a real problem in our industry is that the vast majority of the firms out there were created by people who left the insurance industry, and I’m one of them, yeah, and so they left the insurance and they built their their financial planning firm, and they’ve been successful. They’ve done a great job for their clients. There’s nothing wrong with them. They’ve done a great job, but they don’t have a succession plan. It is, amazingly, it’s everywhere. It’s ubiquitous, pretty much. And so and it’s a challenge for them, because there aren’t a lot of people coming into our industry, which, really, I don’t understand why young people are not coming into our industry. It’s a great career. You’re helping people. You know, it’s you get paid well to do it. Yeah, it’s fun, but yet, getting people out of college to. Them into our career. It’s really difficult. It’s a challenge for our industry, and we’re always looking for ways to do that. And so a lot of these people, mostly men, a lot of these guys, don’t have a succession plan. They don’t have somebody in their firm that’ll take over if they die, if they get disabled, or if they retire. So it’s a very reasonable question to ask, what’s your succession succession plan. What happens if you’re not here?

Jeremy Thornton  

Yeah, that’s absolutely a great point. Okay, so you’re talking about people. A lot of them have come over from insurance in the past, started their own kind of boutique thing, and they’ve become successful. Maybe they get a bunch of employees, and they have a whole company that works for them. They have all that kind of good stuff. What amount people that are just kind of starting their own boutique, and they’re really not known very well, or they’re not popular, and you can’t really find anything about how do you go about checking their background? Because you want to, you want to know who they are and how they’ve run their business.

Ken Moraif  

Yeah, checking into their background is extremely important, and it’s also difficult. Yeah, it actually upsets me that it’s so difficult. Because the average consumer who wants to check into the background of a financial advisor, it’s a task, and therefore a lot of people just end up giving up or don’t do it. Yeah, so the SEC the Securities Exchange Commission, has a website, but I’ll just tell you in advance, it’s not easy. I’m not kidding. You got to click through and click through and click through to get to the important stuff. And if you don’t know how to do that or to do it in advance, then you may not get to the meat and potatoes that you’re looking for. Right? So the website, it’s kind of has a funny name. It’s website advisor info.gov, wow, okay, yeah, okay, so they actually called it website. It’s website advisor with an e, okay, A, D, V, i, s, e r, not o r, because people get that one mistaken. Advisor, website, advisor.gov and when you go there,

Jeremy Thornton  

info.gov, website advisor, info.gov, and when you go on screen, we’ll put up on screen, promise, so you can see how it starts.

Ken Moraif  

It’s really weird. So when you go there, you’re looking for several things. Okay, number one is you’re looking for, are they registered with the SEC at all? You’d be surprised how many people say they’re a financial advisor and they’re really not. Okay. It’s very prevalent. Okay. Just because you’re giving financial advice does not necessarily make you a registered financial advisor, so you got to make sure you have that. So then they you want to see what their registration status is because they may have been registered at one time, but now they’re not, which then rings all kinds of red flags as to, why not. Right, right? So you might see that also, you’re going to have to go and find what are called disclosures. Okay, okay, so look for that yes and that, you know, every time they change the website, sometimes that moves. But you’re looking for disclosures. Disclosures are where the government basically has said, here’s where all the disciplinary actions are. Here’s all the fines that they may have paid. This is if they declared bankruptcy. This is where all the good stuff or bad stuff, I guess, that you could look for is it resides in the disclosures. So if you don’t get to the disclosures page, you ain’t seen nothing. Yeah, right, they may be registered. They may not, you know. So that’s you got to find the disclosures. And then finally, you want to look at their ADV filings. Okay, okay, so don’t ask me what ADV stands

Jeremy Thornton  

for. That was gonna be my next question.

Ken Moraif  

I don’t know, but it is a very important document, and in there you’ll find any complaints that people have made against them. You’ll find any regulatory actions that the advisor is required to report. So if they did something wrong and they were fined by the government, then now they have to report that that’s in there, in the ADV filings, yes, so you got to go search around. Yeah, you know, I wish they had it front page. All right, there. So you go there, and boom, there. It all, is it? Ain’t you got to dig. And so, you know, it’s it, and it’s difficult to find. Yeah, but again, this is maybe one of the most important decisions financially you’re going to make by choosing a financial advisor. So you want to do a proper background check, so make the effort to go to the website and then dig deep, and it’s a pain in the neck. Yeah, I wish it was easier, but do your due diligence. It’s worth it. It’s worth the time. Definitely worth it, absolutely.

Jeremy Thornton  

Okay. So moving on from because the SEC is the kind of government oversight for this industry, so you want to make sure that they have some footprint there, right?

Ken Moraif  

There’s also FINRA, but in this case, we’re talking about a registered investment advisor, not a stock broker or a brokerage house. Yes, that’s a whole different gotcha kettle of fish. We’re talking about the space of financial advisors. Perfect.

Jeremy Thornton  

Okay, so the next thing is, you know, how do financial planners make their money? And one thing that I hear a lot is commissions, yeah. And so what should we ask there? And kind of, how should we postulate that inquiry?

Ken Moraif  

Yeah, so the first thing I want to say is that somebody who earns a commission is not a bad person, right? Okay, that it doesn’t, it doesn’t automatically cause them to be evil, right? Absolutely, it does cause them to have a conflict of interest, right? Because they’re not being paid by you. They’re being paid by the company that’s paying them the commission, right? So there is a conflict of interest there. The vast majority of people in in the financial services industry are good people, okay? But there are bad actors, as there are in every industry, of course. And so those people are the ones you’re trying to flesh out, yes. Okay, so you want to ask if I, if we ever sell anything, if we ever buy anything, do you make a commission for that? You know, what are the fees, the charges, the commissions that I’m going to pay if that is, if we do that and get a very you know, I hate to say, get it in writing, because these days, getting in writing is starting to mean nothing. But get it in writing, yeah? So at least, if you have to go to the extreme, you have something in writing that shows that, but get it in writing so you have it. Don’t just accept a verbal, oh, we don’t have any commissions or, Oh, our commissions is our X. You want to see it where it’s written, and that’s usually in the ADV, yeah,

Jeremy Thornton  

okay, yeah, that’s perfect, because that’s their incentive, right? So it’s all about what incentivizes you? What incentivizes a financial planner, things like that.

Ken Moraif  

You want to know what they get paid to do, right? Absolutely. I have an expression, you know, they always say people do what they get paid to do, absolutely right? So if they get paid to make commissions, they’re going to sell you a lot of commission products,

Jeremy Thornton  

absolutely okay. So the next one is kind of talking about all the different boutiques and versions of financial planners that there are out there. Yes, are our goals aligned? And do you work specifically with what I want? Yes or my goal? Yes. So how do we how do we ask that?

Ken Moraif  

That is a phenomenal question. You know, I kind of equate it to an elbow surgeon, okay, right? So an elbow surgeon specializes in the elbow joint, right? The elbow joint is a really difficult joint because it moves in all kinds of directions and all of that. So it’s very different than the knee joint, which only goes one way. It’s very different than brain surgeons, heart surgeons, you know? So you go to a an elbow surgeon when you have an elbow issue, right? So I would say the same thing when it comes to when you go to a financial advisor. You want a financial advisor that specializes in where you are in your financial life journey. Okay? So we specialize in people who are retired or who are retiring soon, okay? I’d say within five to 10 years. If you’re going to you’re building your plan to get to retirement, or you’re already retired, that’s what we specialize in. We train our people in that it’s what we do. We Eat, drink and sleep, it it’s what it is our thing, right? So if you go to a generalist, or somebody that specializes in something that is not that, then certainly you can talk to a knee surgeon, and they can tell you all about elbow surgery, sure, and maybe they’ll even, they can even do it, but somebody who does only that, I think, is the one I want, right? So what do you specialize in and I would say that a jack of all trades or a generalist is nothing wrong with them. Okay, I’m not denigrating anybody, but I’m saying the planning that you’re going to do to get you to retirement and then to stay retired, have your money last as long as you do, this is very different than the planning when you were 20, 3040, and maybe even your early 50s, it’s very different. You got a lot of different things. You are transitioning from putting money into your investments to taking your money out of your investments. And now you’re going into a whole new world rollovers of IRAs, when to take Social Security? What to do with your pension? What to do with I mean, there’s 1000 things that were not things you considered when you were 2030, or 40, but now you’re starting to think about right? So talking to people, if you’re in that demographic, which our demographic is, that you want somebody that specializes in that, and that’s where we sit,

Jeremy Thornton  

absolutely, yeah, and, you know, it’s a totally different world. You know, you just like your work life is going to change your home life’s going to change your financial planning? Yeah.

Ken Moraif  

You know, speaking of that, one of my favorite things to ask people to do, if they want to know if somebody specializes in retirement planning, is ask the potential advisor. Is, tell me all about Irma. You got me What’s Irma? Well, exactly, yeah, just say, tell me all. About Irma? Yeah. And if they give you a blank look, they don’t know. They don’t know how to plan for retirement. It’s a very important thing to know when it comes to when and how you take your Social Security. Yeah, it’s massively important. Yeah. But if you don’t know what Irma is, then you haven’t been trained in that. And so you’re a generalist who can speak to that stuff, who can convince you that I can help you with that. But when it comes to the brass tacks of making those decisions, you want to talk to somebody that has been trained that specializes in that

Jeremy Thornton  

area, lives, breathes and eats it, yeah? And it’s, you know,

Ken Moraif  

it’s the same thing, for example, as if you were choosing an attorney, yeah, right, course, yeah. So if you’re looking to do your estate planning, you would hire an estate planning attorney, not someone who specializes in, you know, the guys that are on all the billboards everywhere that are saying yeah, and the personal injury guy could probably talk to you about estate planning and say, Yeah, you know, we can draft your will and such, but they don’t specialize in that yeah and vice versa. You’re not going to go the estate planning person and say, Okay, I was injured, and now I want to file a, you know, personal injury, and they and they can talk to it, but they don’t specialize in it. It’s the exact same concept, yeah, yeah,

Jeremy Thornton  

that’s, that’s a great point. Okay, so what if I’m talking to a planner and they’re really, you know, selling me really well, and I like what they’re they’re trying to say in and we bring up returns, and they say, Don’t worry about returns. I always beat the market.

Ken Moraif  

Yeah, there are a lot of versions of that. You know, just recently, one of the very large companies sent out an email, which many of our clients got, that said, did you make 20% last quarter, whoa. On your on your investments, you know. And if you didn’t, then, you know, talk to us. So during that quarter, you know, the market was up, I think, 6% or something. So that’s an eye Popper, right? That’s crazy. And we had clients, you know, asking us, Hey, what’s up with that. Why did, why didn’t you make, yeah? So, you know, you have to be careful with these kind of things, because one way of doing that is to have multiple portfolios, right? So let’s say you have 100 of them, and one of them is all crypto, yeah, and one of them is, you know, so they’re all different things. And then the crypto one goes up 20% in that quarter, right, right? And then you send out an email to everybody, the prospective and say, did your portfolio beat that? And suddenly you’re like, Wow, no, it didn’t. Well, yeah, but that same crypto could lose 20% in the next quarter, you know, so, so you have to be very careful. But in general, you know, people that claim they can beat the market consistently, I would turn around and and grab my wallet and run, you know, because studies have shown that even the greatest investors consistently don’t beat the market. Yeah, in fact, the statistic that I saw was that if you can beat the market, you know, or have a better performance in the market 51% of the time consistently, then you’re going to be in the top 5% of all the financial people in the world.

Jeremy Thornton  

Wow. It only 51% 51% Wow.

Ken Moraif  

Which means you’re wrong. You’re not going to beat the market 49% and then those people, they don’t do it consistently. They can, you know, there’s famous stories of people who’ve done it for 10 years, and everybody think they know how to do it, and then suddenly what they were doing doesn’t work anymore. And suddenly they’re they’re gone there. There are some very famous examples of that, where their strategy did work, but times have changed. Technologies changed. You know, their methodology didn’t work anymore. So be careful of choosing a financial planner, because they claim that they can beat the market, or maybe they have beaten the market for the last 10 years. You know, just because they have doesn’t mean that it’s

Jeremy Thornton  

going to happen in the future. Yeah, it doesn’t mean that they will, yeah, yeah. That’s, that’s, that’s, a, that’s a really good point that, you know, you can statistics. There’s, there’s some old saying, or it’s like, you know, 70% of all statistics are made up, and which is also a made up statistic, right? It is so, so you can take numbers, you can kind of skew it however you want. You know, that’s, that’s always a game to play. That’s one of my favorite ones, right? People are like, Oh, wow, 70% Yeah, I just made that up.

Ken Moraif  

Or they say, yeah, they say, they say, say, I was wondering who they are. They are, right? Yeah, these days are really smart people. They’re always saying things, okay?

Jeremy Thornton  

So we’re talking to them. Maybe they don’t, they, they don’t talk about being in the market. But one, one, I think really important thing is a something called a fiduciary, yeah, and which can coincide with commission. So, so what? How do we, how do we. Raise that question,

Ken Moraif  

yeah, so again, I just want to make sure that I’m clear that people who earn a commission are not bad people, right? Okay, so you know, life insurance, sales people, long term care insurance, car insurance, you know, they all get commissions. They’re not bad people. They’re doing their job, and the vast majority of them are honest, have integrity, so getting a commission is not a bad thing. So that you ask, Are you a fiduciary? Or do you get commissions? Or are you a hybrid? Doesn’t disqualify anybody. What you’re doing is you want to make sure that you understand how they get paid. Yes, right? So now you know that if they come across and they get paid a commission for selling annuity products, then you know in the back of your head that potentially there’s a conflict of interest here, because they’re trying to sway me to go into this commission product, right? So again, it doesn’t mean good or bad. It just is right. It’s just being aware so fiduciary, and I’m being very broad here, you know, so I have to, I have to be careful, because there’s a very, you know, specific definition of that, and if I do it wrong, my compliance, people get, will get mad at me. But generally speaking, I’m being very general. Okay, so is that the fiduciary has your best interest at heart, right? Right? In other words, they are making decisions with only your interest at heart and not their own betterment, right, okay? And in theory, that’s the best person to work with, right, okay? But it’s not always the case. You know? I would say that if you have an incompetent fiduciary and you have a very competent person who gets commissions, I’d rather work with a competent commission getter than the incompetent fiduciary. So again, these are questions to ask so you have information, but they’re not disqualifiers. Yes. And then there are firms that are hybrids, okay, which means that they have products where they get a commission for and basically what, and they’re also a fiduciary at the same time. And that’s not good or bad, it just is. And so what they have to do is, if they’re doing it properly, which they should be, is that if they’re going to talk to you about something that does get a commission, they have to basically tell you, Okay, Jeromy, I just took off my fiduciary hat, and I just put on my commission person hat. So this following conversation I get a commission on, just so you’re aware. So let’s talk about, maybe your need for long term care insurance, maybe your need for Medigap insurance, maybe your need for life insurance. You know, these are all part of the financial planning process, yes, but I get a commission for it. So just so you know, I’ve switched, I’ve taken that hat off and I’ve put this new hat on. Does that make me a bad guy? No, because you may need life insurance. You may need long term care insurance, it’s important we talk about it. So again, questions to

Jeremy Thornton  

ask, yes, more information for yourself, so you can compare and contrast whoever you’re talking to exactly. Okay, so we’re talking about commission. So how do we propose the question of like, what are you selling? Let’s say, let’s say they are commissioned, or maybe they’re fiduciary, but they’re still selling something, yeah, right at the bottom, at the end of the day. So, so how do we ask them what products sell, and what should we keep an ear out for?

Ken Moraif  

Yeah, I guess the easiest way to answer that question is to look at the question that you would ask is, you know what percentage of your income comes from commissions versus, you know, fiduciary work. And that’ll tell you where their focus is, yeah, you know. And again, you can go to the ADV and it tells you, you know, a lot of information about that, which, again, you can go to that website and find they also, you can ask them to give it to you, yes, and they they should have it readily. They can print it off and just hand it to you. So that might be the easiest way. But, I mean, just think about it. If you’re talking to somebody who is purporting to be a financial advisor, you’ve done all your homework. They are SEC register. They’re everything. You know, everything checks out, and then the question is, okay, well, what percentage of your income comes from x versus y, and 90% of their income comes from commission products, and 10% comes from fiduciary products? Yeah. Well, that tells you a lot Yes, right now, is that bad? Again? No, not necessarily, but it does tell you this is what they’re probably going to do, yes. And you have to ask yourself, is that what I want do I want somebody who is entirely on my side and never has anything, you know, from a income standpoint or etc? So asking them, What products do you sell, and what percentage of your income comes from these products versus, you know, the advice, right?

Jeremy Thornton  

Okay, perfect. So we’re talking about leading up to retirement, yeah, and kind of our financial game plan likely should change a little bit as as we do that, especially going into retirement things like that, yeah, how? How does that mindset? Change for a financial planner who is dealing with 20 year olds or 30 year olds or 40 year olds. And how does that kind of, how do you ask them, hey, what changes now that I’m 50 or when I retire? Yeah, how do I ask that? And what’s a good question there to kind of

Ken Moraif  

propose, okay, so let me set the stage here to kind of give you why this is important. Yes, okay, so I kind of look at it like as a football team, right? And you have, you have an offensive coach, offensive coordinator, and you have a defensive coordinator, okay, so I would say that until that that switch that you flip the switch on. Now I want to retire. You’re an offensive coordinator. Yeah, you’re going for it. You want to score points. This is what you’re doing. You’re aggressive. You’ve got your 401 K contributions you’re making. You’ve got wages. So you can be more aggressive. You’re on offense once you have flipped the switch in your head. This is a psychological event, but when that happens, when you’ve decided now I want to start planning for retirement. I want to retire, and so I can see where that’s going to be the case. Okay? I can see it. It’s five years it’s 10 years away. Now you need to start thinking from a defensive coordinator standpoint. You need to start thinking about protecting what you’ve built. Because if that switch has gone off for you. You’re probably in your 50s, so at this point, you’ve probably worked for 30 years, or, you know, thereabouts, or 20 years, to accumulate what you’ve got. So you really need to start thinking, in my opinion, that I need to protect this. I need to defend this against the other team, which is inflation, taxes, bear markets. Me, my spending, my kids, the greedy, unwashed, undeserving heirs. There’s all kinds of people that want your money, right? And if you, if you don’t protect yourself against all of that stuff, you could run out of money. So now I think your the your paradigm has changed. How you think should change from offensive coordinator to defensive coordinator, and there’s a transition there. It’s not a, it’s not a, you know, you don’t go from one to the other, right? But it’s a transition thing. And the closer you get to your retirement, I would say, if you’re within five years of your retirement, you need to be thinking about being a defensive coordinator at this point. Yeah, when you’re that close, you want to protect what you’ve got, okay? Because if something goes really badly in that five year period, suddenly you can’t retire. Yeah, right, if you have a big, bad bear market, like 2008 for example, or y 2k with the dot coms when they all crashed, something like that, happens, you lose half your money because you’re still on offense. Yeah? You know. And think about a football team that has no defensive team? How many games would they win? Zero, I would guess zero, none. Yeah, right, yeah, you throw an interception, you don’t get a first down, yeah? And you got no defense, so the other team gets the ball, and they just drive and score, and then they kick off to you, and now you got to score again. And if you don’t score, they get the ball, they score again. Yeah, if you have no defensive team to put on the field? Yes. If you have no defensive coordinator, you’re going to lose the game, of course, right? Yes. So you got to make sure, in our in our view, that you have a strategy to address big, bad bear markets. Now, in our firm, we do. It’s called invest and protect. So anyway, so that’s the stage, right? Yes. So what’s the question? And this question is, I think, very important, because it flushes out two things. So the question is, how did you do in 2008 and then just don’t say anything, yeah. So one of two things is going to happen. One is, well, we weren’t even in business then, so I can’t answer that, okay, which tells you that they haven’t been in business that long, yeah. And so you want to question, you know, do I want to be with a with a newbie firm? Secondly, it will tell you if they have a strategy to address that. Yes. Because, as we’ve described in other podcasts that we’ve done, those three enemies. In our opinion, inflation is easy to deal with taxes. You know, there are lots of strategy to address that, but for some reason, dealing with big, bad bear markets is something people just ignore. Yeah. They just do Yeah. But yet, that’s the one that if you lost half your money, it dwarfs income taxes, you know, it dwarfs inflation, it dwarfs everything, yes, and it causes you to say, Wow, I just lost half my money. I can’t retire now, yep. And I’ve been doing this long enough, I saw it happen in 2000 I saw it happen in 20 in 2008 where people were right on the brink of retiring, and then suddenly they had to continue working for 567, years. So do not take for granted that bear markets don’t happen, because it’s been so long since 2008 right? Okay, the longer we are from the last one, the closer we are to the new one. And don’t assume it’s not going to happen. You have to plan for it. So the question is, do you have a strategy to address what happened in 2008 if a big, bad bear market comes along and, you know, there’s, there’s also kind. Of a trick way of doing it. Okay, if you’re talking to somebody about your retirement planning, don’t ask the question, but have it in your mind if they don’t present to you. And by the way, if a big, bad bear market comes along, this is how we’re going to protect you from that. If they never say it, yeah, if they never talk about it, if they never address that potential, then they don’t have one. Yeah? Because if they had one, they’d be telling you about it. Yeah.

Jeremy Thornton  

So in a bear market is like a big downturn in the market?

Ken Moraif  

Yes, yes. So bear a bear market is when the stock market goes down, or any investment goes down by more than 20% from its previous peak. But what I’m talking about is the big bad bears, yes, which are the 2008 the white 2k the Great Depression. On average, those those guys happen about once a decade, but sometimes, you know, on average means that you get two of them in a decade, and then you don’t get one for another 20 years. You know, which is kind of the case now, yeah, we haven’t had one since 2008 but don’t kid yourself, they happen, right? And so if they don’t talk about it at all, that might be the best question to ask. Is not not asking it, but having it in your head. What you know they’re not saying anything about this, so therefore they don’t have it. Yeah. Now in our firm, we do. We call it invest and protect. And in fact, in 2008 the clients that followed our strategy were out of the stock market for the entire year of 2008 Yeah. So the blood, I mean, the bloodbath that happened there, the crash, the chaos. It was horrible. It was horrible for lots of people. But fortunately, we did not lose. We were not in the stock market at all that year because our strategy said to get out and stay out. So we have and the reason why we have it is because of the demo that we work with. People who want to retire, have a target date, or who are already retired, cannot afford to lose half their money in the next big, bad bear. So again, that’s maybe the best way to do this, as I said, is not to ask the question, but to listen with that question in your mind,

Jeremy Thornton  

absolutely awesome. Well, I think that’s a that’s all that I had for how to choose a good financial planner.

Ken Moraif  

I think it’s pretty exhaustive. There are other things, I guess one of the other, one of the other most important things is, do you like them? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you get along with that exactly because, as I said at the top, you’re getting married to this person. So, you know, you got to be able to work with them over the long run, hopefully for 20 or 30 years. And that being the case, you know, you want to have a very strong feeling that you can work well with them. Do they do? Do they answer your phone calls? Do they? Yeah, do they, you know, do you like them? Do they speak in a way that you understand very well. You know, do they have Bo are they rude? Are they rude? You know, I had, you know, I was talking to one of our advisors about this. You know how important it is, you know, to make sure that you, when you’re visiting with a prospective client, that you talk to both parties, of course, and I said that, and he said, You know what? We just, we just bought a house. We went through the whole process of buying a house. And he said we were working with this real estate person, and we found the house that we absolutely loved, but this person never once talked to her. Talked only to him the entire time. And so she said, we are not buying that house because I’m not doing business with that guy. Absolutely, that’s it. Period. That guy lost the sale because he didn’t give her respect. So if you feel disrespected. If you feel that they don’t speak your language, you know the variety of reasons. If your spidey sense is tingling, don’t ignore that, because you’re going to be talking to this person for 20 years, potentially. Yeah, and it’s only going to get worse. It’s not going to get better. If that little thing is aggravating you now, imagine getting aggravated by that thing over and over and over. It’s going to build and build and build it’s not gonna be fun for you. So I would say that’s another very important thing to consider love a bonus. Well, ladies and gentlemen, I hope you had as much fun watching this as we did making it for you. I Please like and subscribe to this, because it helps us tremendously. I hope this video finds you healthy, wealthy and wise, and we’ll talk soon Retirement Planners of America, RPOA.