United Capital Financial Advisors LLC has launched customized financial planning guides for clients that incorporate their attitudes about money along with financial data to create a plan for investing, saving and spending, United Capital announced Tuesday.
The client guidebooks are personalized for each individual or couple and combine data from the client and advisor. They are designed to capture a person’s financial life, including where he or she is starting from and how to get to their goals, United Capital says.
United Capital previously developed "Money Mind" to determine how clients feel about money and "Honest Conversations" to know where they are and what goals they want to achieve. The guidebooks use this information to determine priorities and what financial areas each client needs to work on to achieve his or her goals.
The report is digital and can be altered as a client's life changes. The results are available in a printed version and as an e-book. The e-book allows for embedded audio, video and live, written communication.
United Capital says it developed the tool to combine online planning with guidance from an advisor. “The guidebook offers couples and individuals a complete summary of the ways they think and feel about money, their entire current financial situation in detail, an array of deliberate actions to take in order to achieve their financial dreams and an engaging visual road map for every aspect of their financial life,” says United Capital.
To date, United Capital has built and delivered more than 1,000 guidebooks, with clients receiving both digital versions and hard copies.
“We strongly feel that the relationship between clients and advisors should be viewed as a journey, not a set of appointments or charts,” says Joe Duran, CEO of United Capital. “Through deeply engaging technology applications, we’re able to help individuals and couples make better choices and empower our partner advisors to deliver a truly memorable and powerful client experience throughout their clients’ lifetime.”
Paul Bennett, managing director of United Capital in Great Falls, Va., has created guidebooks for about 100 clients so far and he has gotten positive reactions from them. Bennett works with approximately 300 clients and manages $350 million in client assets.
“The parts clients like best are the funding score, which is a score between zero and 100 that shows clients how likely they are to reach their goals, and the priority action list that shows what needs to be done to reach the goals and what areas are already on track,” Bennett says.
“The plan summary is actually a homework assignment for both the advisor and the client that shows what they need to do before the next meeting,” he adds. “The guidebook can be updated at any time. It gives the advisor a way to pull all of the information about a client together and to make changes to the plan at the push of a button.”