Why a good financial adviser helps people figure out how to spend their money — not just save it
In a new interview with Yahoo Finance's Adam Shapiro, Edward Jones managing partner Penny Pennington discussed what 'a good financial adviser does' and why 'purpose' is a key compotenent of what people want to discuss.
Video transcript
- When we look at this kind of planning, one thing that we don't tend to focus on is saving too much. And in preparation for this discussion with you, you actually have clients who are saving too much? Explain this to us.
- Well, one of the things that we know is that critical impacts on a saver's or investor's life, especially during their formative years, when they were beginning their investing life, play out for them for the rest of their lives. And so for some who are in retirement today, things that happened in their lives, especially in the financial markets years ago, taught them to be very, very careful. And so as a financial advisor, I often had a harder time convincing people that they really could spend the money that they had saved for all those years in taking their families on vacations or in making philanthropic kind of gifts and donations. That's another part of what a good financial advisor does.
I think this is one of the fundamental things that also happened during the pandemic, is people have gotten in touch with what's really important in their lives and the legacies that they want to leave to their children, to community organizations, the things that they're passionate about in order to leave the world better than they found them. And that's why we were so interested to learn in the [? Age ?] [? Wave ?] study that purpose is fundamentally a part of what people want to plan for and talk about before they're in retirement and after they retire.
