The Financial Planning Association is making a psychology course available to members that is designed to expand their expertise in behavioral finance, the organization announced today.
The course, which is being made available through a partnership with two psychologists and authors, is worth nine continuing education credits. Those who complete the course will also earn a Psychology of Financial Planning Specialist Badge.
“With increased recognition of psychology’s impact on financial behavior, there is a need for today’s financial planning professionals to understand better how they can best serve their clients,” the FPA said.
The seven-hour, online program was developed by Brad Klontz and Charles Chaffin, co-authors of “Psychology of Financial Planning: the Practitioner’s Guide to Money.”
“The program focuses on how financial planners can build deeper relationships with clients through tools and techniques that build better communication, cultural competence, goal-setting, and responding to client crisis events,” the FPA said.
The course includes instruction on the following topics:
• Client Values and Goals: The Planner’s Role in Facilitating Financial Success, which identifies the key factors that motivate a client’s financial decision-making.
• Understanding Your Client’s Background, which focuses on how a client’s past experiences around money can impact their financial beliefs and behaviors, including the impact of financial trauma on a client’s relationship with money.
• Understanding Your Client’s Money Beliefs, which outlines the main categories of money beliefs and how they impact financial behaviors and outcomes.
• Understanding Your Client’s Financial Behaviors, which focuses on applying financial psychology to help explain, interpret, and evaluate financial behaviors.
• Multicultural Competence in Financial Planning, which outlines the impact of race, culture, gender, and sexual orientation on the client and planner’s financial experiences, money beliefs, and financial behaviors.
• Dealing with Client Money Conflicts, which focuses on the four common sources of money conflict in clients’ lives and strategies the advisor can use to address money conflicts in couples and families.
• Six Steps to Help a Client Navigate a Crisis Event, which identifies the types and characteristics of client crisis events frequently seen in financial planning.
• Behavioral Finance for Financial Planners, which identifies common heuristics and biases and how they can impact client financial decision-making and well-being.
• Client Learning Styles and Risk Tolerance, which provides a comprehensive overview of various client learning styles and how financial planners can incorporate them into their practice.
• Principles of Effective Communication, which focuses on key verbal and non-verbal communication strategies that can effectively build a relationship of trust and credibility with clients.
• Counseling in Financial Planning Practice, which provides counseling techniques that planners can use with financial planning clients.
• Getting the Client to Take Action, which focuses on the six stages of the change process, how a financial planner can identify each stage in a client, and most importantly, how to react and respond to help the client take action.
• Implementing Financial Psychology into Practice, which focuses on the value that the psychology of financial planning brings to clients and planners and asks the financial planner to identify elements of their financial psychology and how their background, beliefs, and cultural identity impact the client-planner relationship.
The program is designed to help financial planners “identify client biases, beliefs, behaviors, and other psychological factors that impact the client’s financial goals and the client-planner relationship,” the FPA said. Financial planners “also will also be able to apply various tools and techniques to help increase client acquisition, retention, and the effectiveness of financial planning and identify their own money beliefs and biases that can impact their client relationships.”
A webinar about the course will be held Oct. 24. FPA members can register on the FPA website,
“Financial psychology is a critical area that needs to be explored by today’s financial planning practitioners. This program will position our members to serve the unique needs of their clients better and provide them a deeper appreciation of how their clients think about finances and what they can do to help them make better financial decisions,” FPA CEO Patrick D. Mahoney said in a statement.