You wouldn't know it by looking at the sun-dappled courtyards, the palm tree gardens, birds of paradise, the sun-splashed hotels overlooking Disneyland and planners talking animatedly while scurrying through the wavy glass façade of the Anaheim Convention Center, but the mood among financial advisors during October's Financial Planning Association conference in Southern California was more subdued and serious than in years past, said attendees.

There were fewer freebies, pens and T-shirts being given away, raffles, and offsite activities. And those impressions were borne out by hard numbers. The conference attendance dipped this year to 2,100 from about 3,000 last year in Boston, said Marv Tuttle, the FPA's executive director and CEO. That mirrors a drop in FPA membership by almost 10% to 25,000 from 28,000.

"We hoped with the better economic conditions [more recently] folks would be coming out, but they're staying home and still hanging in there with the clients," Tuttle said at a convention press conference on Monday.

Tuttle said the conference numbers likely shrunk for a number of reasons. Financial planning firms that saw large revenue losses in the economic downturn have cut back budgets for travel, conferences and employee membership dues.

Mark E. Johannessen, the 2009 FPA chairman of the board, said his own firm (Harris SBSB, where he is a managing director) had to cut its staffers' travel budget to zero for fiscal 2009 (though it has jumped back up for fiscal 2010). The firm also had to cut staff, and asked three employees to drop FPA memberships because they weren't using the benefits.

"As a leader of FPA, I fought hard [at my firm] to maintain the status quo because I realize the impact it has on FPA. At the time, I was not comfortable telling my board colleagues we were going through this. ... I recognized the financial challenges FPA was under, but I also realized that I needed to make some tough business decisions [at Harris]."

Tuttle said membership has also suffered because the FPA and its coalition partners, NAPFA and the CFP Board, have taken a stance on regulation and fiduciary standards that some of its members can't abide by with their current business models.

But numbers are also likely down, Johannessen said, because the FPA is coming off a peak from last year's 3,000 in Boston, whose East Coast locale attracted a great many planners, he said.

In any case, the mood was more serious in Anaheim, and the panels more trenchant and sober, focusing on the opportunities that the changing economic environment has wrought for financial planners at a moment when the economy is improving, tax laws are in flux, and the market is turning upward.

One keynote speaker, Marci Rossell, an economist for CNBC with a comedic bent whose presentation was Jim Cramer-meets-Robin Williams, gave her take on possible economic recovery. "We are firmly in resolution phase, yet the economic recovery probably just began about six weeks ago, which makes it very hard to see."

Rossell put a bright sheen on the increased savings rates of consumers. She said that while many think these increased savings rates could dampen a turnaround, she herself thinks that the new frugality (after several years of zero savings when people were indulging their penchant not for hoarding but for buying shoes) could help the economy rather than hurt it in the long run.

"Rising savings is sort of a painful adjustment process," she said, "but I'd rather take that adjustment process for more resiliency and less sort of boom and bust over the next decade."

She also said that out-of-control housing prices (so bad in the recent past that she mentioned even she preferred renting) have probably bottomed in the U.S., putting median home values in line with median income for the first time in a long time. She believes that the U.S. deflation will not be of the sort seen in Japan, but rather a short-term phenomenon due mainly to the recession. And she believes surprising export strength will help lead the U.S. into recovery.

Another keynote speaker was David M. Walker, the former U.S. comptroller general and one of the forces behind the documentary I.O.U.S.A., a cautionary film about the national debt. Walker took his turn at the lectern to decry the out-of-control spending taking place in Washington, D.C. under both the current and last administrations. He said the big crisis he sees is not the current recession but the fact foreign lenders might lose confidence in the ability of the U.S. government to put its own financial house in order, which Walker said could drive up interest rates, crush the dollar and eventually harm the economy and American families.

"It's important that we recognize," he said, "that the most serious challenge facing the United States-and in a collateral effect, others around the world-is not terrorism, is not nuclear proliferation, is not climate change. In the United States, it's our own fiscal irresponsibility. It is one that threatens the future of our country and the future of our families. We have a ticking time bomb."

Getting Younger Planners Involved

Younger planners also had a higher profile at the conference. Tuttle said that as a disproportionate number of older planners retire, the role of younger planners coming up through the pipeline becomes more important. And yet many younger planners have grown anxious about the austerity cuts in travel and education budgets this year, as many of them rely on conferences such as the FPA's to seek connections and mentors.

"Like anybody, younger planners are worried about whether firms will have or retain positions for them," said Michael Branham, a financial planner at Cornerstone Wealth Advisors in the Minneapolis area, and the chair of NexGen, a professional group for young advisors. "It's a particular issue economically for younger planners because a lot rely on their firms' education budget to attend conventions like this one."

For practical reasons having to do with the current economic circumstances, Branham said NexGen hitched its annual meeting this year to the FPA Anaheim conference (it usually holds a separate confab in July), and gathered for a "pre-conference" in the days before the FPA's meeting started in earnest last week.

During the conference itself, the FPA also tried to keep its members up to date on social and technology trends with a presentation called "Twitter Live!" in which industry stars twittered their key thoughts about advising for 2010.

"They wanted to create a sense of connectedness with those who could not be at the conference and/or those who could not attend every session," said Marie Swift, a communications specialist and president of Impact Communications in Leawood, Kan., who hosted the "Twitter Live!" event.

Of course, it's not only young planners coming up fresh in the industry but career changers who were trying to get toeholds at the FPA's meeting.

One of the conference attendees was R. Wallace Larson, a retiring lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army who tackled his M.B.A. through online courses at California Lutheran University while still stationed in Iraq and Germany. After a 22-year career in the military (where he served as a helicopter pilot, fight instructor and aviator logistician in Iraq, Germany, South Korea and the former Yugoslavia), he decided to come back to the U.S., settle down in the Chicago area with his wife and newborn son, and pursue his passion for personal finance.

He came to the conference for several reasons, he said. "One was to meet the faculty and classmates in the online program I'd never met in person," he said. But he was also networking and trying to find employment. He passed his CFP exam this year, and though he hopes work at a firm focusing more on the planning process and less on product sales, he's been a bit chagrined to find more of the latter.

"It's harder to find jobs to learn the financial planning profession than it is to find jobs that are sales oriented," he said. He's even encountered firms where he says interviewers implied they wanted employees to drop their CFP licenses because of the FPA coalition's increased focus on hard-line fiduciary standards.

Those kinds of obstacles, in this kind of economy, were just one more reason to give advisors pause and make the sessions more serious, and even sessions on Roth conversion were full to bursting with people sitting on the floor. Several sessions covered the cracks in the different laws on fiduciary standards and a few tackled the much discussed safe-withdrawal rate for clients who've seen their portfolios tank.

"No doubt the mood was different this year," said Johannessen, who said the content was much more intense this year. "It seemed serious. The feedback I've gotten from veteran conference-goers was that content was strong this year, and sometimes you go and it's hit-or-miss." 

--Eric Rasmussen