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The first meeting with a planner is not the relationship. The relationship is the series of reviews that follow: after a bonus, after a fall in markets, after a child is born, and once each year when the tax file is prepared. A household that meets once, buys a product, and does not return has purchased a transaction. It has not built a partnership.
This article describes what that partnership should contain. It assumes you have already decided that a planner is useful, as the previous article set out.
Bring the same one-page file every time: sources of income, loans and cards, the emergency reserve, nominees, insurance dates, and the tax regime chosen for the year. Ask the planner to walk through that page before any product is discussed. If the meeting begins with a scheme and never reaches the card or the nominee, the meeting has missed its purpose.
Agree a calendar. Once a year is the minimum. A short call after a large bonus, a planned sale, or a sharp market fall is extra, not a replacement for the annual sitting. Both adults in the household should be able to attend, or at least to receive the same written note afterwards.
The planner’s value is often highest when a fund has fallen and the household wants to pause the systematic plan, or when extra money has arrived and a new product is being offered from several sides. The agreed work in those weeks is to return to the purpose and the date, not to replace the plan with the most recent story. Staying invested through a weak year, where the purpose has not changed, is part of the partnership. So is refusing a product that has no new purpose.
If you cannot speak honestly about a card balance or about a pause you have already made, the planner is working with an incomplete file. The relationship will then produce incomplete advice.
Know each year how the planner is paid. If a product will produce a commission, that fact should be stated before you accept the product. A clean fee for a review is easier to understand. Either model can be honest. A model that is not explained is not a partnership.
The planner does not replace a chartered accountant on a complex return, and does not replace a lawyer on a will. They should be willing to say so, and to work with those professionals on the same facts. Wealth Transition will deal with passing wealth to the next generation. Until that pillar is read, the planner’s task on that subject is to keep nominees current and to note when a will has become overdue.
If three meetings have passed with no written note, no review of loans or tax, and a new folio each time, the relationship has become a sales calendar. You may change the planner. Changing the planner is not a failure of the idea. It is a refusal to keep an empty ritual.
A short written note after each meeting — what was decided, what was deferred, and the date of the next review — is more useful than a long presentation that is never opened again.
The George household in Raichur met their planner every June. In the third year the equity funds they held had fallen, and they arrived intending to stop the plans. The planner opened the original purpose page, showed that the education date was still nine years away, and asked only whether that date had changed. It had not. The plans continued. No new scheme was added. The couple later said that the meeting had been the least eventful, and the most useful, of the three.
The partnership is working when fewer products are discussed and more of the old decisions are still in force. Activity is not the measure.
Changing planner after every uncomfortable year, and also refusing to show the new planner the card and the loan. The file has to travel with you. Otherwise each new person starts from a clean page that is not your life.