This past holiday season, Lee played Santa by distributing the KidsWealth Money Kit program as a gift to clients' children ages 4 through 12. The program contains tools to teach kids how to manage their money and tries to instill the notion that wealth is a state of mind. Among other things, it provides various wallets for different purposes such as personal savings, charitable giving or future education. If a kid gets a $10 allowance, they decide with the parents what percentage of the money goes into which wallet. It teaches them how to work from a budget.
Lee believes that small things like that can help circumvent feelings of entitlement among children of wealthy parents. "I don't pretend to be a child psychologist or have all of the answers on how to do it," says Lee. "But we make sure that parents are aware of these issues, otherwise their kids might become a money pit until they get into their thirties or forties."
Michael Dubis, president of Touchstone Financial in Madison, Wis., believes that the raison d'etre of financial advisors makes them uniquely positioned to help clients align money with well-being. "We got into this business to serve," he says, "and there's a lot of research correlating happiness with serving others. So right away we have the foundational component where advisors get to connect with clients."
Dubis is, well, dubious about the concept of life planning to achieve client happiness, at least as it applies to analytical methods that put people into boxes based on personality types. "Money is the most powerful secular force on earth," he says. "Based on that, a lot of what we do revolves around life planning because money exerts such a powerful influence."
The key to achieving this rests on forging authentic client relationships aimed at promoting happiness, says Dubis. Borrowing from the work of University of Wisconsin researcher John Nelson, he looks at happiness as three integrated circles comprised of mental, physical and financial health.
Financial advisors can play a direct role with the money component, but Dubis believes they can also positively influence the other two aspects by plugging clients into qualified outside resources. His resource partners include fitness coaches and money counselors. He's big on the issue of career asset management, and he recently helped a client unhappy with her job by hooking her up with a career counselor versed in the areas of skills, awareness and networking. And Dubis will delve into spiritual matters with clients if the topic comes up. "I can't talk to them about Buddhism, but I can connect them with a person at the community center who's plugged into it."
Dubis uses his newsletter to touch on issues beyond traditional financial advice. He'll reference books such as The Number and others that relate to money and well-being, and will include articles relating to children, cardio-vascular fitness or other life-related topics. Most of all, Dubis thinks advisors have to walk the walk before they can help their clients in meaningful ways relating to life planning. "You need to be aware of your own life to have authentic relationships with clients."
So in the end, can money buy happiness? Galvan of the Kinder Institute of Life Planning thinks that is a false question because money is an external issue and happiness is an internal issue. "The two worlds may intersect at points," she offers, "but one is not causal to the other."
Galvan sees money as society's circulatory system, carrying needed resources from one place to another. "Money helps sustain our lives," she says. "We're not happy just because we have blood flowing through our veins, but it does help keep us alive."
To get more from our blood-er, money-Galvan says advisors need to help clients access and articulate their dream of freedom, whatever that might be. It might have more to do with time than money. It might be centered on the quality of relationships or with health.