Notes from the conference
I just spent three days at a conference in Phoenix at enormous expense and I really want to take something away from this. I usually lock my learning in via blogging. I don't have time to do a proper write-up all at once, though, so I'm going to just start and maybe add more to it.
One of the things that made sense to me was a saying about being over-booked. He said to figure out what is really valuable so you know what to say "yes" to, and to stop saying "yes" altogether: either say "hell, yes!" or "no". I puzzled about how do I handle the phone calls I don't wish to return and the emails that aren't worth following up to, though. For example, a client emailed me saying, "my refund was $20 different than you said it would be. Why?" Chances are a typo in the tax return the IRS corrected, but maybe a typo from the IRS, and maybe they told me a different amount for their quarterly estimated tax payment than I expected. It's not going to be a math error. It's not going to need correcting. It's vaguely interesting to me if it's a typo and I know the client's faith is shaken in me if it is, but the truth is that I do not wish to spend half an hour of my time tracking this down. How to say "no" (or, in this case, "hell, no!") to his kind offer to let me spend half an hour of my unbillable time assuaging his curiousity? Do I owe every looky-loo an hour on the phone? (The answer is that I do not. But if I don't want to return their phone call, how do I let them know that without returning their phone call?)
Another take-away from the conference was about the way people anchor on negative thoughts. The explanation is that you remember very strongly if there was a tiger at a water hole. It fills your brain much more than all the times there WASN'T a tiger at the water hole. To unplug from negative thoughts (which tend to feed on each other) they gave me a nice little trick to unplug from that circuit and go start a new one. You do a good deed for someone else. It works, sort of the same way as humming "by Mennon" stops an earworm.
On the way to the conference I read an article about positive psychology and striving to be happy as opposed to just avoiding being miserable. It was a good start to this conference, which focused largely on those issues. The article got me to go buy Stegelman's book "Flourish", though. It arrived in the mail today. I'll read it in my abundant spare time. (Joke. That's a joke. I have no idea when I'll read it.)
--------------------------------------------
Going through the events: Bob Doll said that the economic outlook was neither bullish nor bearish but just barely good enough going forward with nothing exciting on the offing. (The phrase he used was "muddle through".) He also talked about how beta won't work - there's so little to be had - so we're going to have to use alpha. Then he tried to explain his brilliant tips for achieving alpha. He likes stocks with lots of free cash: financials, tech, telecom, utilities. Oil dividend is only 1/3 being spent, the other 2/3 are being saved or used to pay down debt. He says, "he knows Americans, and they don't save 2/3 of anything, so they're about to start spending it." He also thinks there is wage growth coming, but the parade is moving so slowly that it's no fun to watch. Another attendee asked the question I was sent to ask: paraphrasing: "what happens to the market if someone is elected who vows to start a trade war and publicly states that it would be okay to default on the national debt?" The answer was that Presidents don't get to do the shit they promise they'll do, it'll be up to Congress, and if the Congress stays divided then no harm will come to the economy. However, if Hillary wins in a landslide and we end up with an undivided Congress and Executive branch then we can expect market tumult. Basically, the markets prefer a deadlocked government. Interesting, I hadn't thought about it like that. He says that in election years the stock market is usually up 7%, but in years when Presidential parties change it's down 4%. Correlation/causation issues abound. Asked if we should worry about the massive Federal debt he said not yet, the GDP is growing faster than the debt. But if (when) the GDP starts growing slower than the debt we have a problem. U.S. still the cleanest shirt in the dirty laundry hamper. He prays for corporate tax reform before he goes to bed at night. I liked Bob Doll but he's a CFA and they all think they can pick stocks. I would happily have drinks with him, but at the end of the day I'd beat his portfolio in embarrassing ways. Nice ladies don't mention things like that to people with MBAs from Wharton School, though. (I was about to mention here that I have an inferior MBA, but it suddenly occurred to me that I actually don't. You don't know the name of the school, but I know the rigor of the program and that I graduated first in my class and won the Wall Street Journal Award that year. Oh, yeah. I forgot.) Point is, his plan to create alpha is nonsense. My actual plan to create alpha is boringly hard to convey though: I create alpha by keeping my clients from doing stupid shit. Try selling that message, though.
II went to a Mitch Anthony talk on the Changing Face of Retirement, in which he basically said to stay engaged, keep learning, and it's fine to work as a greeter at Walmart because you'll be happier than sitting home watching Fox News. It had a lot of appeal as a pep talk, but utterly ignored the fact that for many, if not most people, retirement isn't a time for self-actualization and finally achieving happiness, it's forced upon you because you aren't physically CAPABLE of standing up for an 6 hour shift, and/or incipient of full-blown dementia prevents you from being employable. Mitch Anthony appears to have never met a person who had their keys taken away from them in retirement. I found it very pollyannish. (Looking back, I panned his book when I reviewed it, too.)
I went to one about creating a practice for "serving women of every age, every stage" and they told me how to serve the 50-something divorcee or the 60-something widow. Gee, thanks. I wanted to know how to serve the 20-something new careerist or the 30-something young family better. Didn't get it. Got some nice stuff about working with widows, though. Bought Kathleen Rehl's book on Amazon while she was speaking. Take-away: ask them, "what stuff did Joshua do? How did you arrive at this spot now?" Say his name. Say you're sorry for not meeting him. Recognize that there's a big hole where he sat at the desk. Also, questions to ask clients, "Have you ever thought there might be an addiction issue here?" Nicely worded. The thesis here is that the pain points these women have are they are worried money will not last, they don't want to manage investments themselves, they wan trusted advisors, they want supportive education, not to be dictated to. (And this differs from men how exactly?)
I don't remember what I did at 1 pm on Wednesday. Maybe something about financing long-term care? No, it was about investing in Millennials. Give them job flexibility was the take-away from that, as I recall. Also, that clients like to see some hanging around your office looking like succession planning.
I went to the Federal Reserve Bank economist's talk at 2 pm. The take-away there is that the U.S. economy is very very boring. I tried to listen in between the lines and it was still boring. It was a compliment to Bob Doll's treatise that absolutely nothing interesting is going on. Heh.
AT 4:00 I went to Carolyn McClanahan's talk on creating a long term care plan. She talked about having engagement agreements between family members. Spell it out. Who is to do what? What do you do in case of conflict? It was terribly lovely. I hope her family is as nice as that. I think I've met people like that before. It would be astonishing if all the members of the same family shared that same attitude, though. Again, the allure was strong but perhaps no more realistic than Mitch Anthony. But it would be a good aspiration. I've heard Carolyn McClanahan speak before and I would recommend it.
Wednesday at 5 pm was one on "A Life Well Spent". I swear I wasn't grumpy all day long, but he *really* bugged me. His thesis is that we shouldn't want nice cars or big houses or acreage adjoining a golf course - he doesn't! We should want close ties with children and grandchildren and travel memories - he does! We were instructed to clarify to our clients that they shouldn't value the goals they brought to us, but instead substitute the goals that were revealed to us by a preacher. Uggh. I fall firmly into the camp of NOT substituting my judgment about what people should want for theirs. My job is to help them achieve their goals. If they aren't achievable I can certainly steer towards reasonable substitutes, but the whole thing was super preachy and judgmental and I'd have about zero clients if I tried that. A good take-away, though, was to encourage people to do destination vacations with their family members. He's right about that: there's a really high satisfaction rate for the money spent there. He also had a nice pithy comment about questions to ask clients: he said you ask them what they fear to find out their hopes, because "people fear in the direction of their hope". Also, you ask "what are you grateful for" to find out what they feel they didn't deserve, and "what are you thankful for" to find out what they think they deserved. Not as sure about that, but I like the one about fear and hope being on the same axis. Oh, and he threw in a nice Margaret Fuller quote. (I like Margaret Fuller, she's a distant relation.) She said, "Men, for the sake of getting a living, forget to live." But he also had some duds: "wisdom is applicaiton of knowledge" and "transparancy is the currency of trust." Huh? He seemed to appeal to a lot of the people in the audience, but I've been a regular church-goer all my life and I recognized a pulpit when I saw one. (Which reminds me, I want to blog someday about my thoughts about the podcasts by J. David Stein, who has recently been revealing HIS wisdom to me in helpful ways.)
This theme of religious instruction went on with the "Disciplines Pursuit of Less" by Greg McKeown the next day. He's the one that said to say "Hell, Yes". I was fairly happy with his presentation, but partly because I'm into "disciplined pursuits" of all sorts.
Thursday mid-day I did two long sessions on advanced trust planning. The take-away from that is to shut my mouth if people want to make trusts the beneficiary of IRAs. I know they have bad tax consequences, but there are other factors to consider. Duly noted. I need to know enough about trusts to be able to discuss them with the attornies. That objectives wasn't entirely met, but furthered.
I went to a seminar on social security. I learned one nugget in that. What was it? I left my notes on the table there, I think. I think it was about widows. They have a special trick about how they can claim. I'll have to think about this later if a widow age 60 to 66 hires me. (ETA: no, it was that the Windfall Elimination Provision applies to Canadian government pensions.)
Thursday later in the afternoon we had a really good presentation from the heads at Fidelity, Schwab and TD Ameritrade. All deigned to speak to us as the principle players in the fiduciary RIA movement, but they were all still a bit bewildered at the concept of us not being broker/dealers. They are inventing the services they bring us in real time as we invent the profession. It's really interesting to see them scramble to keep up with our desires for better portals and lower fees (when they want to shut down liability and raise their profit margins). I had a chance to speak afterwards with a vice president at Fidelity about something that had been bugging me. My children have an image of me as some sort of conquering valkyrie that I strive to deserve, and that was one of those moments. A word to the wise is sufficient and sometimes I have a moment where I can speak truth to power. It remains to see how sufficient that is.
On the subject of custodians, I grabbed the "Be Greater: why being good enough is no longer an option" book from the Fidelity booth. At TD Ameritrade I participated in the Human Finance Project, where I was interviewed for a documentary they are producing. Within 30 seconds we determined that the filmmaker interviewing me there in Phoenix was the sister of one of my long-time clients. Because of course she was. I am suitably nervous about how they portray me on film.
Friday morning was a lecture about behavioral psychology (the notes from that are how I opened this blog entry) and then I went to one on the power of social media. (Short version, I should gussy up these blog entries and attack Facebook, LinkedIn and my website's blog with stuff. I responded to this entreaty by going to LinkedIn for the first time in months, putting a short post on Facebook, and updating my website. Done and done. I feel zero desire to tweet, and couldn't come up with the energy to clean up any of the pictures I took for instagram. Oh, I know how, I just can't quite be bothered. I'll update my website's blog, though, to get some new material up there. I go through this journal and edit/re-write to fill in material from time to time. Like, once a year. Good enough, right?)
I started a session on the technology planning process, but got called away when my airport livery service arrived half an hour early. Having heard stories about super-long TSA lines I figured it was a good idea to go, so I did.
The TSA lines at the airport were amusing: they appeared short until you got up close and then you realized they went around corners and snaked around a bit so that you couldn't see how long they were, Disney-style. I got through unmolested, though, and arrived at my gate in good spirits. When they said the thing they always say about not having room for carryon, I decided to be a sport and check my carry-on bag. I had packed lightly for this trip and it was one of the smallest rolling suitcases, but I was on my way home and didn't mind too much if my bag were slow to arrive. But what happened next SUCKED. I mean, REALLY sucked. I need to put it in its own entry and go do a good deed for someone after I write about it.
But to conclude this one, the conference was a good one and a good complement to the one I'm going to in November (which is more technical and less woo woo). I was glad I went, but next time I'll make a point of only going on years when it's on the east coast. I'm going to have to have a really compelling reason to ever fly with a layover ever again.
One of the things that made sense to me was a saying about being over-booked. He said to figure out what is really valuable so you know what to say "yes" to, and to stop saying "yes" altogether: either say "hell, yes!" or "no". I puzzled about how do I handle the phone calls I don't wish to return and the emails that aren't worth following up to, though. For example, a client emailed me saying, "my refund was $20 different than you said it would be. Why?" Chances are a typo in the tax return the IRS corrected, but maybe a typo from the IRS, and maybe they told me a different amount for their quarterly estimated tax payment than I expected. It's not going to be a math error. It's not going to need correcting. It's vaguely interesting to me if it's a typo and I know the client's faith is shaken in me if it is, but the truth is that I do not wish to spend half an hour of my time tracking this down. How to say "no" (or, in this case, "hell, no!") to his kind offer to let me spend half an hour of my unbillable time assuaging his curiousity? Do I owe every looky-loo an hour on the phone? (The answer is that I do not. But if I don't want to return their phone call, how do I let them know that without returning their phone call?)
Another take-away from the conference was about the way people anchor on negative thoughts. The explanation is that you remember very strongly if there was a tiger at a water hole. It fills your brain much more than all the times there WASN'T a tiger at the water hole. To unplug from negative thoughts (which tend to feed on each other) they gave me a nice little trick to unplug from that circuit and go start a new one. You do a good deed for someone else. It works, sort of the same way as humming "by Mennon" stops an earworm.
On the way to the conference I read an article about positive psychology and striving to be happy as opposed to just avoiding being miserable. It was a good start to this conference, which focused largely on those issues. The article got me to go buy Stegelman's book "Flourish", though. It arrived in the mail today. I'll read it in my abundant spare time. (Joke. That's a joke. I have no idea when I'll read it.)
--------------------------------------------
Going through the events: Bob Doll said that the economic outlook was neither bullish nor bearish but just barely good enough going forward with nothing exciting on the offing. (The phrase he used was "muddle through".) He also talked about how beta won't work - there's so little to be had - so we're going to have to use alpha. Then he tried to explain his brilliant tips for achieving alpha. He likes stocks with lots of free cash: financials, tech, telecom, utilities. Oil dividend is only 1/3 being spent, the other 2/3 are being saved or used to pay down debt. He says, "he knows Americans, and they don't save 2/3 of anything, so they're about to start spending it." He also thinks there is wage growth coming, but the parade is moving so slowly that it's no fun to watch. Another attendee asked the question I was sent to ask: paraphrasing: "what happens to the market if someone is elected who vows to start a trade war and publicly states that it would be okay to default on the national debt?" The answer was that Presidents don't get to do the shit they promise they'll do, it'll be up to Congress, and if the Congress stays divided then no harm will come to the economy. However, if Hillary wins in a landslide and we end up with an undivided Congress and Executive branch then we can expect market tumult. Basically, the markets prefer a deadlocked government. Interesting, I hadn't thought about it like that. He says that in election years the stock market is usually up 7%, but in years when Presidential parties change it's down 4%. Correlation/causation issues abound. Asked if we should worry about the massive Federal debt he said not yet, the GDP is growing faster than the debt. But if (when) the GDP starts growing slower than the debt we have a problem. U.S. still the cleanest shirt in the dirty laundry hamper. He prays for corporate tax reform before he goes to bed at night. I liked Bob Doll but he's a CFA and they all think they can pick stocks. I would happily have drinks with him, but at the end of the day I'd beat his portfolio in embarrassing ways. Nice ladies don't mention things like that to people with MBAs from Wharton School, though. (I was about to mention here that I have an inferior MBA, but it suddenly occurred to me that I actually don't. You don't know the name of the school, but I know the rigor of the program and that I graduated first in my class and won the Wall Street Journal Award that year. Oh, yeah. I forgot.) Point is, his plan to create alpha is nonsense. My actual plan to create alpha is boringly hard to convey though: I create alpha by keeping my clients from doing stupid shit. Try selling that message, though.
II went to a Mitch Anthony talk on the Changing Face of Retirement, in which he basically said to stay engaged, keep learning, and it's fine to work as a greeter at Walmart because you'll be happier than sitting home watching Fox News. It had a lot of appeal as a pep talk, but utterly ignored the fact that for many, if not most people, retirement isn't a time for self-actualization and finally achieving happiness, it's forced upon you because you aren't physically CAPABLE of standing up for an 6 hour shift, and/or incipient of full-blown dementia prevents you from being employable. Mitch Anthony appears to have never met a person who had their keys taken away from them in retirement. I found it very pollyannish. (Looking back, I panned his book when I reviewed it, too.)
I went to one about creating a practice for "serving women of every age, every stage" and they told me how to serve the 50-something divorcee or the 60-something widow. Gee, thanks. I wanted to know how to serve the 20-something new careerist or the 30-something young family better. Didn't get it. Got some nice stuff about working with widows, though. Bought Kathleen Rehl's book on Amazon while she was speaking. Take-away: ask them, "what stuff did Joshua do? How did you arrive at this spot now?" Say his name. Say you're sorry for not meeting him. Recognize that there's a big hole where he sat at the desk. Also, questions to ask clients, "Have you ever thought there might be an addiction issue here?" Nicely worded. The thesis here is that the pain points these women have are they are worried money will not last, they don't want to manage investments themselves, they wan trusted advisors, they want supportive education, not to be dictated to. (And this differs from men how exactly?)
I don't remember what I did at 1 pm on Wednesday. Maybe something about financing long-term care? No, it was about investing in Millennials. Give them job flexibility was the take-away from that, as I recall. Also, that clients like to see some hanging around your office looking like succession planning.
I went to the Federal Reserve Bank economist's talk at 2 pm. The take-away there is that the U.S. economy is very very boring. I tried to listen in between the lines and it was still boring. It was a compliment to Bob Doll's treatise that absolutely nothing interesting is going on. Heh.
AT 4:00 I went to Carolyn McClanahan's talk on creating a long term care plan. She talked about having engagement agreements between family members. Spell it out. Who is to do what? What do you do in case of conflict? It was terribly lovely. I hope her family is as nice as that. I think I've met people like that before. It would be astonishing if all the members of the same family shared that same attitude, though. Again, the allure was strong but perhaps no more realistic than Mitch Anthony. But it would be a good aspiration. I've heard Carolyn McClanahan speak before and I would recommend it.
Wednesday at 5 pm was one on "A Life Well Spent". I swear I wasn't grumpy all day long, but he *really* bugged me. His thesis is that we shouldn't want nice cars or big houses or acreage adjoining a golf course - he doesn't! We should want close ties with children and grandchildren and travel memories - he does! We were instructed to clarify to our clients that they shouldn't value the goals they brought to us, but instead substitute the goals that were revealed to us by a preacher. Uggh. I fall firmly into the camp of NOT substituting my judgment about what people should want for theirs. My job is to help them achieve their goals. If they aren't achievable I can certainly steer towards reasonable substitutes, but the whole thing was super preachy and judgmental and I'd have about zero clients if I tried that. A good take-away, though, was to encourage people to do destination vacations with their family members. He's right about that: there's a really high satisfaction rate for the money spent there. He also had a nice pithy comment about questions to ask clients: he said you ask them what they fear to find out their hopes, because "people fear in the direction of their hope". Also, you ask "what are you grateful for" to find out what they feel they didn't deserve, and "what are you thankful for" to find out what they think they deserved. Not as sure about that, but I like the one about fear and hope being on the same axis. Oh, and he threw in a nice Margaret Fuller quote. (I like Margaret Fuller, she's a distant relation.) She said, "Men, for the sake of getting a living, forget to live." But he also had some duds: "wisdom is applicaiton of knowledge" and "transparancy is the currency of trust." Huh? He seemed to appeal to a lot of the people in the audience, but I've been a regular church-goer all my life and I recognized a pulpit when I saw one. (Which reminds me, I want to blog someday about my thoughts about the podcasts by J. David Stein, who has recently been revealing HIS wisdom to me in helpful ways.)
This theme of religious instruction went on with the "Disciplines Pursuit of Less" by Greg McKeown the next day. He's the one that said to say "Hell, Yes". I was fairly happy with his presentation, but partly because I'm into "disciplined pursuits" of all sorts.
Thursday mid-day I did two long sessions on advanced trust planning. The take-away from that is to shut my mouth if people want to make trusts the beneficiary of IRAs. I know they have bad tax consequences, but there are other factors to consider. Duly noted. I need to know enough about trusts to be able to discuss them with the attornies. That objectives wasn't entirely met, but furthered.
I went to a seminar on social security. I learned one nugget in that. What was it? I left my notes on the table there, I think. I think it was about widows. They have a special trick about how they can claim. I'll have to think about this later if a widow age 60 to 66 hires me. (ETA: no, it was that the Windfall Elimination Provision applies to Canadian government pensions.)
Thursday later in the afternoon we had a really good presentation from the heads at Fidelity, Schwab and TD Ameritrade. All deigned to speak to us as the principle players in the fiduciary RIA movement, but they were all still a bit bewildered at the concept of us not being broker/dealers. They are inventing the services they bring us in real time as we invent the profession. It's really interesting to see them scramble to keep up with our desires for better portals and lower fees (when they want to shut down liability and raise their profit margins). I had a chance to speak afterwards with a vice president at Fidelity about something that had been bugging me. My children have an image of me as some sort of conquering valkyrie that I strive to deserve, and that was one of those moments. A word to the wise is sufficient and sometimes I have a moment where I can speak truth to power. It remains to see how sufficient that is.
On the subject of custodians, I grabbed the "Be Greater: why being good enough is no longer an option" book from the Fidelity booth. At TD Ameritrade I participated in the Human Finance Project, where I was interviewed for a documentary they are producing. Within 30 seconds we determined that the filmmaker interviewing me there in Phoenix was the sister of one of my long-time clients. Because of course she was. I am suitably nervous about how they portray me on film.
Friday morning was a lecture about behavioral psychology (the notes from that are how I opened this blog entry) and then I went to one on the power of social media. (Short version, I should gussy up these blog entries and attack Facebook, LinkedIn and my website's blog with stuff. I responded to this entreaty by going to LinkedIn for the first time in months, putting a short post on Facebook, and updating my website. Done and done. I feel zero desire to tweet, and couldn't come up with the energy to clean up any of the pictures I took for instagram. Oh, I know how, I just can't quite be bothered. I'll update my website's blog, though, to get some new material up there. I go through this journal and edit/re-write to fill in material from time to time. Like, once a year. Good enough, right?)
I started a session on the technology planning process, but got called away when my airport livery service arrived half an hour early. Having heard stories about super-long TSA lines I figured it was a good idea to go, so I did.
The TSA lines at the airport were amusing: they appeared short until you got up close and then you realized they went around corners and snaked around a bit so that you couldn't see how long they were, Disney-style. I got through unmolested, though, and arrived at my gate in good spirits. When they said the thing they always say about not having room for carryon, I decided to be a sport and check my carry-on bag. I had packed lightly for this trip and it was one of the smallest rolling suitcases, but I was on my way home and didn't mind too much if my bag were slow to arrive. But what happened next SUCKED. I mean, REALLY sucked. I need to put it in its own entry and go do a good deed for someone after I write about it.
But to conclude this one, the conference was a good one and a good complement to the one I'm going to in November (which is more technical and less woo woo). I was glad I went, but next time I'll make a point of only going on years when it's on the east coast. I'm going to have to have a really compelling reason to ever fly with a layover ever again.