Perhaps you’ve heard of Sophia Bera. The 30-year-old founder of Gen Y Planning in Minneapolis hasn’t been in business for even a year yet, but she’s quickly made a name for herself as one of the leading voices among the next wave of financial advisors in the millennial age group.
Millennials, or Generation Y, are roughly defined as people born between the early 1980s and early 2000s. They’re a large demographic that’s coming of age professionally and financially. Within the financial advice business, they’re the next wave of planners in an industry desperate for fresh blood. On the client side, they’re small potatoes for a lot of established financial planning firms because they’re generally lacking in investable assets.
Bera’s firm is all Gen Y, all the time. Prior to starting her one-woman shop late last May, she was a financial planner at LearnVest, a personal finance and lifestyle Web site for women. But she knew she wanted to go solo and who her target market should be.
“I realized my sweet spot was working with people in their 20s and 30s, and I wanted to develop a business specifically for them,” says Bera, who holds the CFP designation. She describes her Gen Y clients as tech savvy and wanting things done in a tech-enabled way, and they don’t like long meetings or ponderous reports.
Working from her living room, she meets with clients via e-mail, Skype and Google Hangouts. She has 15 clients from around the U.S.—her first client was a referral from another financial professional, but most clients found her on the Internet by reading articles she’s written on various Web sites, or seeing her on Twitter or checking out the financial tips and anecdotes about her own financial life she’s posted on Gen Y Planning’s Web site.
“With clients, I focus on what’s going on during the next few years that we immediately have to work on,” Bera says. “Then we can set them up for future options where we talk about retirement and tax planning.”
She gives them a 10-page Word document that covers the gamut from various planning needs to cash flow and debt management. She says she puts it in plain English and makes her recommendations in a bullet point format. “People love it because it’s clear, digestible information,” Bera notes. She includes a one-page retirement projection in Excel.
Bera has gained some notice from other advisors for her business model, which entails charging an initial planning fee based on the complexity of a client’s situation, plus a monthly subscription fee ranging from $99 to $199. She says Gen Y is comfortable with monthly subscriptions because that’s how they pay for some of the essential services in their lives. “But they have to have some skin in the game up front, which is why I require an initial planning fee,” she says.
In February, Bera launched a service for people who aren’t ready for advanced planning services but who want more information on a specific topic such as a student loan repayment or making sense of a benefits package at a new job. The $499 service entails a 60- to 90-minute meeting on Skype, plus a follow-up e-mail with recommendations on that particular topic.
Bera firmly believes her generation is at the vanguard of change within the advisory profession. “I think there’s a lot going on within the planning industry that’s really shaking up the model,” she says.
Focus On Gen Y
March 2014
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