“I have worked with David Kantor quite a bit, and it was David who suggested I combine my work with him and my investment counseling to write a book,” White said. (White said that the opinions he is expressing “are solely mine and not those of Hemenway Trust Company.”)
Before financial planning is discussed between White and a new client, he has gleaned enough information from the client -- likes and dislikes, biographical data, attitude toward money, even body language -- to establish their personality type.
“I don’t try to play the role of shrink. My job is to listen on different levels. Childhood stories will often be volunteered and that will be an opportunity. The door opens up for the advisor to inquire gently “What happened there, how does that affect your view of wealth?’ You can easily tap into some very strong emotional stuff,” White said.
He shows in numerous examples, fictionalized to protect privacy, that knowing clients personality types helps a wealth advisor to keep counseling productive and avoid disagreements and emotionally charged decisions.
White says the wealth generator in a family tends to be a Fixer, and that the children of a Fixer tend to have great difficulty standing up to the Fixer. “They get steamrollered; they become Protector and Survivor. Think of the Rockefellers’ first generation: clearly a Fixer, striving for money no matter what. Questioning the morality of what he has done, of winning at all costs, is very difficult for the children,” White said.
To avoid the steamroller effect, he has had to navigate between Fixer personalities, most often men, and their spouses, children and/or siblings.
In one example, the husband of a couple in their 60s with a portfolio of $12 million, 80 percent of it from the wife’s trusts and gifts, pushed White to increase their equity holdings from 80 percent to 90 percent. The husband insisted that being less aggressive had cost the couple $2 million in assets. The wife’s investment thinking was more reserved; she preferred the slow and steady approach that made her family wealthy; this caused tension between the couple.
White tempered the husband’s “emotional exuberance” and “gives him a dose of reality” by discussing price-earnings ratios, price-to book and dividend yield matters, the reliability of 12-month economic forecasts, as well as market corrections, and “the herding instinct” encouraged by TV analysts and bloggers. The husband agreed that revisiting the equity weight of their portfolio could wait for another day.
The steamroller effect on women is an important cause for concern: Because they feel their opinions and needs have been ignored, as many as 70% of women fire their financial advisors after being widowed. “The numbers are scary! I wonder if the male, who may be the Fixer personality type, is usually in charge in such settings and it is difficult to engineer the sharing of responsibilities between husband and wife,” White said.