I can never understand why some advisors postpone their tax planning until December of each year. Are tax losses that one can harvest more valuable in December than they are in January? And, of course, a tax loss in February may not exist in December if the market has rebounded. Tax losses are windows of opportunity and need to be seized upon when they occur. In volatile years, we may tax harvest for some of our clients several times. We did so in 2008 and early 2009 and, as a result, many of our clients still have substantial loss carry-forwards and will not pay capital gains taxes for several years.

Everyone retires.

Asking a client, "When do you plan to retire?" is, in our opinion, very presumptuous. There are people, including me, who have no plans to retire. But so much of what is promoted as financial planning assumes that everyone wants to retire at some point in their lives.

So we ask the question, perhaps get a superficial answer, and go about the business of projecting what that might look like and what the client needs to do to accomplish a goal that she may not even have. We prefer asking each client, "How do you visualize your life in your 60s, 70s, 80s and beyond?" If retirement is in the client's plans, she will tell you.

Accumulating wealth is the major purpose of financial planning.

While wealth accumulation may be a desirable goal for many of our clients, the primary job of a financial life planner is to help clients answer the question: "For what purpose?" As we have written on several occasions, we need to remind our clients that money is a wonderful servant and a poor master. While most people understand this intellectually, their actions are often in conflict. Also, the media does not help with its "stock of the week" mentality. As planners, we need to take the time to truly understand our clients' goals and wishes and help them develop and follow a plan that gets them to where they want to be. Accumulating a large estate to leave a legacy may be what they want. But to assume that everyone wants to die rich is not financial life planning and if that is what we do, we should label ourselves, "wealth accumulators," not "financial planners."

We prepare financial PLANS.

From time to time I am asked by advisors who don't know me very well whether I prepare a financial plan before investing a client's money. As we discuss this, it becomes obvious to me that many of these people see a financial plan as something they prepare only once before they start managing a portfolio.

People do not need financial plans, they need financial planning and that implies an ongoing process with regular meetings and updates to assure that they are on target to achieve their goals, and that changes in their circumstances are factored in to their planning. It is a lifelong process.

Monte Carlo simulations are accurate predictors of clients' odds of success.