#77 Dr. Meghaan Lurtz – Transcript

Louis van der Merwe
Welcome to another episode of Ensombl Advice South Africa. Today I have in the studio with me Dr. Meghaan Lurtz for a lot of you that name might be familiar if you read any of the kitsis.com articles that come out. Meghaan is a senior research nerd there. And Meghaan, I just saw your top five Strength Finders on the kitces.com platform. And we happen to share a few which I think that learner right and it comes through in all of the work you you do. For people that are not familiar maybe with what you do, can you give us a little bit of a background just on your story into the financial services world?

Dr. Meghaan Lurtz
Yeah. So like many people in financial services, I have found over the years, there was some nepotism involved in me getting into this industry. My mom, a was the is was is the CIO, of a of a rebalancing platform called Total Rebalance Expert. And I went to work for her. And I happened to be at like a TD Ameritrade conference. And I started talking to this financial planner, but he was also a professor at Texas Tech University. And he was like, you know, and I had my master’s in psychology, and I was talking to him about how I would talk to these advisors, and we would be working on rebalancing their portfolio, you know, because like, Billy needed to go back to rehab, or Sandra, you know, crash the car, or they were about to have this big vacation, like, sometimes it was a nice thing, you know, and so they needed to get money out of the portfolio. And so you would start with like, talking about portfolio things, but you would end with like, family things. So I’m having this conversation with this, this advisor slash professor, Dr. Barry Mulholland, who’s now at Akron state. And he was like, you know, if you feel like all this stuff, like, you know that there are actually people that are studying, like, the emotions and family dynamics around money. And I was like, really? And he’s like, yeah, they’re a Texas Tech, and they’re at Georgia. And if you want to end Kansas State, and if you want to meet them, I’ll help you. So I mean, he didn’t have to do that. It was just like sort of one of those amazing happenstance moments of a very kind, man. And he did just that he introduced me to Dr. Sonia looter and Dr. Christy Archer Letta. And I had a conversation with them immediately signed up for their master’s program, two classes into their master’s program signed up for their PhD, finished my PhD. And around that time, I was looking for work. I’m a military spouse. And so we move around a lot. So finding a stable job can be challenging at times. And two of my classmates, Dr. Lawson, and Dr. thar both named Derek. Were working for Michael. And they were like, You should like there’s this woman that we know. And she’s, she’s pretty smart. She knows the things, you know, like, and she doesn’t really get, she has to move around. So like, maybe you can even get her at a really good rate. And so they helped me to meet Michael and Michael, and I hit it off. And just because Michael also loves the psychology of financial planning and the relationships in financial planning, as much as he loves all the tax stuff, too. Like, I secretly think even though Michael may never say it out loud, that he actually loves the psychology stuff, the most out of all the things that we do. So we bonded over that, and I started writing continuing education. questions for Michael. And then, you know, as time sort of went on, I was like, you know, I can write Michael, and he was like, Oh, yeah. So I started writing for the platform. And then I started writing very regularly for the platform. Now I write at least 18 articles a year. I’m a professor at Columbia University in New York, I teach the financial psychology class, I’m a professor of practice at Kansas State University teaches a fair number of financial planning classes, as well as our advanced financial planning classes, as well as financial therapy classes. And I also every once in a while teach at Maryland, and I hope to be doing some teaching at the American College, as well. But for Michael, I do research and writing. We do research on financial planners on the Kitsis platform. And I’m a part I’m technically like, on the research team, even though I spend a lot of time with the editorial team because I write at least 18 articles a year for the platform. So among those things, I’m in between now, on some kids, you know, other things too.

Louis van der Merwe
How do you go about filtering out from the list and list of different topics that you can pick from because it feels like whatever doesn’t fit in The technical spurts, you know, falls on your plate. But then how does the team I’m assuming narrow that down to something that says, hey, this is really what our audience would care about, or what financial planners would care about.

Dr. Meghaan Lurtz
I spend, and I spend a lot of time talking to financial advisors, every quarter for the past almost two years now, I’ve conducted, you can think of it as like qualitative research, I kind of have like a set of No, so many questions, and I will set up interviews with somewhere between 15 and 25 advisors and talk to them about how they talk to their clients, what they talk to their clients about how this particular meeting is conducted versus this particular meeting. What do they have questions about what do they struggle with? So I’m always talking to advisors, and then, you know, I do have the wonderful opportunity to be surrounded by people like Michael Kitsis, Jeff Devine, been an Adam and Erica and Sydney, you know, all all members of the Kitces team that are always like, Hey, do you do you know something about this, like this behavior is happening? Can you tell me tell me why that’s happening. So there’s that as well, just, there’s always people around with lots of opinions at the Kitsis platform. And so getting to hear those and no doubt with with those people is wonderful. I also do a lot of speaking. And so at the speaking events, which is actually how I know that you listened to my most recent webinar, that webinar came to be because of all of the speaking events that I was doing. I had a number of advisors asking me, after I gave the presentation that I was giving, hey, why have these review meetings? And it’s kind of like, barring, you know, like, Do you have any suggestions for that? And so I was just asked that so many times that I should probably do something about that. So I talked to a lot of advisors a lot.

Louis van der Merwe
I mean, that makes so much sense. Right? So bringing in real world struggles that financial advisors are having and saying, Okay, let’s try and figure that out. Have you seen a shift in the types of concerns, has there been a major change in what people are worried about? Generally, the end client,

Dr. Meghaan Lurtz
ah, it’s sort of surrounds to things. And, and I can say that, it’s, it’s certainly changed, like the interest level and things like that. But you know, the, there’s some scary statistics out there worldwide statistics, this is not just like a US problem. That like, it’s like eight out of 10, financial advisors that get started feel like it’s a hard, it’s a hard business, it’s a hard business to get started, it’s hard to find clients. And so as much as they probably want to ask me about their client relationships, we talk a lot about prospecting relationships, because you don’t have a business, it’s kind of hard for me to tell you about your business. So I get asked a lot about you know, how to meet prospects, how to talk to prospects, what’s motivating for prospects, how to think about those initial meetings, where we want to build trust, we want to demonstrate value, we also hopefully will meet somebody that we like, and then be able to, you know, convince them to come to the other side, you know, as a client. So there’s, there’s that people ask me a lot about that. And then I also get asked, just a fair amount about how to have deeper client conversations, you know that and that’s probably the thing that has changed the most the number of people that are becoming more interested in that. And in fact, this is sort of an odd thing, and really just kind of my, it’s anecdotal. It’s just my experience. But I find that I get even more of those questions for Well, I get a great number of those questions from financial planners outside of the United States, just because financial planning is done in such a different way, but doesn’t have to be but oftentimes, it is. The big differentiator, maybe than other things is this human side, you know, of financial planning. And so I find that there’s actually quite a few advisors in India and in Italy, and Spain, and in South Africa, that are more interested oftentimes in talking about the human side of things, and maybe less about the tax side of things. But that could also just be because my tax system is very different than yours. And so they’re like, Why talk about that, you know, but, again, just my anecdotal experience that financial advisors worldwide are quite interested in what it means to be human and how to be better with other humans.

Louis van der Merwe
Yeah, I think I’ve experienced the same you know, if you think about the life centered planning, if you think about George In the work, the sudden money Institute, these are all things that irrespective of where you are in the world, you can apply that. Right not only to your clients, but your relationships. Oh, yeah, if you if you had to create a training program from scratch, for someone that have maybe been in the industry, let’s call it 1520 years that are saying, hey, I want to sharpen my skills, I think I’m technically good. Where would you start? What would be the type of skills that you would focus on? Most we often hear people talk about communication or kind of emotional intelligence, do you think there’s a there’s a certain process? Or is it really dependent on the person?

Dr. Meghaan Lurtz
I think it can, it can be, it’s probably a mix of both, you know, nothing is ever one thing perfectly or the other. But I saw for sure, life planning and the financial transition is the sudden money people, I’m friends and like in these circles, like these are my people, you know, so if you’ve never done that, or never experienced that, or been a part of one of those groups, I would highly recommend it. And, again, some people may not like what I’m about to say next. But I think this is this is not just like financial planners, this is just what happens. You know, so when you have 20 years of experience, whether it’s my 20 years of experience as a professor, or it’s 20 years of experience as a financial planner, or 20 years of experience as a medical doctor, you begin because we all do, you know, we walk into the room and we we know the answers, I know what you’re going to ask me, I’ve taught the Black Scholes model like 70,000 times, like, I know where you’re going to have a problem. You know, and financial planners think I’ve talked to like 1000 people getting a divorce, you know, this isn’t, this isn’t new to me. And I’m not saying that that’s bad. That’s great that we have so much life knowledge and experience knowledge. But this is where it gets tricky for that person. This is their first time and they are vulnerable. And we can sometimes forget with all the knowledge that we have, just how vulnerable that that feels. And I, I teach a lot of financial planners, I work with a lot of financial planners, one of my favorite things to ask, especially well tenured financial planners, is who’s your financial planner. And they usually say something like, oh, I don’t have one. And I’m like, well, like, how can you possibly imagine what it’s like to be your client, if you’ve never had that debit, you know, like, I get that you probably have lots of stuff in order and stuff like that. But imagine showing that to like another professional, and a lot of a lot of financial planners have amazing, like origin stories, you know why they became a financial planner. And I would say 50% of the time, it’s because like something bad happened. And, you know, to have to talk about like that painful experience to be vulnerable enough to be on that other side and think like, oh, God, like this professional might judge me, you know, that, that level of vulnerability, that level of just sort of being humble, you know, trying to come alongside, you know, really trying to step into what your clients go through, I think is an invaluable practice and not something that a lot, I know that if you are a life planner, you get life planned, which is pretty amazing. I think that that’s great. Everybody should go through that. But unfortunately, we don’t have that just for even doing good financial planning. And I wish so like everyone’s not we have like Slack at the Kitsis platform. And then everyone smile asks, like if you could invent a conference, like what would you invent? And that that would be my conference, I would just have lots of financial planners come, everybody gets partnered up with a person that you don’t know. And you have to do it like every five years, you know, because we should do financial planning, you know, not a financial plan. And so every five years, you should have to come back partnered with somebody new, talk about your different financial goals, you know, open up your financial books, have another professional be like, Okay, let’s you know, talk about those things. I think that not only that would just be a good practice so that everybody is financially healthy. But also Yeah, yo, yo, really remember, you’ll definitely know you know, how it feels to be their client.

Louis van der Merwe
And you’ll probably learn quite a few things in that process to say, Oh, this, this person didn’t listen to me. Or maybe I do that. Well, maybe if going through therapy could almost be a process or having a relationship with a therapist. Could be kind of a shortcut to experience some of that vulnerability.

Dr. Meghaan Lurtz
Yeah. I at K State where I teach and and at Columbia, when I teach the financial psychology class that’s usually something that I do Hello students, I’m like, you know, this next eight weeks, it’s going to be like your therapy. And what I would encourage you to do after the end of this eight weeks, if you want to continue, you know, to learn about yourself and to learn about communication, see a therapist you not because there’s anything wrong, but just because it feels good to be spoken to in that way, like it can. It can be such a great example of how to have patients with resistance and things like that. That it, it’s an invaluable experience. I’m a longtime therapy user. And it’s just it’s great, I think, I think Brendan Fraser, everybody in South Africa tends to love Brendan Fraser. I also love him. And I know that he talks very openly about, you know, his experience in therapy and things like that, and how having had that experience as a financial adviser, changed his life on just the way he thought about his ability to communicate with others.

Louis van der Merwe
We’ve seen the same in our business where we’ve prompted people to say, Hey, make use of this, we’ll even pay for it just so that you get comfortable with that type of relationship, you know, the vulnerability, but also being able to, to go to those bases, right? often hear people talk about just kind of journaling, right in this process, yet, it’s not something that we would think of telling advisors to do, like, especially in the early years, it’s about, hey, find your prospects. And in South Africa, we have these big insurance companies, and I’m sure you’ve would be fairly similar, where you start your list of 100 people. And there you go. Yeah. Can we talk a little bit about kind of those early years of finding, finding the right fit the right people that you need to serve? Like, I see that people struggle so much with that, right at the beginning years?

Dr. Meghaan Lurtz
Well, it’s hard, it’s hard for any number of reasons. It can be hard, because the average consumer doesn’t trust financial people. So even if it’s like the 100 people that you know, they’re still dislike, oh, you know, come on. So that can be a bit we you’re already sort of fighting an uphill battle in a way. And then it’s also weird for the financial advisor that, you know, maybe you don’t want to like call your friends, you know, that isn’t always fun. And it can be difficult to find people. And then on top of that, you know, because certainly at the Kitsis platform, you know, we talk a lot about the benefits of having a niche, you know, like really knowing who you’re going to serve and how you’re going to serve them. Carl Richards, you know, talks about, like, you’ve got the bus and you’ve got 50 people, you know, like, what, who do you want to fill your bus with? And like, I love Carl, I always think that’s such an odd for whatever reason, I don’t know why this is, I always think about he’s taking his bus to like one of those crazy music festivals. I don’t know why it’s the first of all, I would necessarily do. Yeah, I’ve just like, we’re going to Bernie and I’m like, okay, Garro like, that’s one way to start a party. Um, well, I don’t think he goes to Burning Man. But anyway. So, you know, that’s Carl’s thing. And but I think that that’s, it’s hard to know that, you know, it’s like telling somebody, well, you know, when you’re going to, when you decide you want to get married, you know, like, just just like find your partner. Well, unless you’ve dated like 50 people and know, like, Okay, I don’t like that. And that tubing is really loud and annoying. Like, unless you figure out what it is that you like, or don’t like, you know, who it is that you really enjoy working with, and who it is that you don’t. So there’s going to be a time in there where you’re just serving people to serve people. And to your point about journaling, like you were actively thinking about that, you know, for the for that first couple of years, like what do I like and what do I not like, you know, about these different clients, then, you know, maybe like three or four years in when you’re stable, then you could say, okay, yeah, these 10 Gotta go, you know, these 10 are okay, for right now. And you know, and I’m an only search for more people like these 10. And so, and then, but you now have something to go on. Like, I write a lot about on the on the Kitces platform that, you know, humans are bad future forecasters were like really bad at guessing what’s going to make us happy. And you know, the types of clients that will like and things like that, you may think one thing and then wind up someplace else. And so I don’t know that, even though I believe that niching is the right way. I don’t think you have to know, you know, that’s like life is one of those things. It’s just like one big experiment. You know, all that really matters is that you get started and that you learn stuff and sometimes you’re gonna learn it worked and other times you’re gonna learn Lego that crashed and burned. But either way like if you’re looking at it as though I’m this is just a learning process. I’m supposed to just be here and trying stuff. You know, I wanted to do financial planning. I wanted to be a financial planner. I’m doing that. I’m doing that sometimes I like it more than others. But you know, I’m doing the thing that I set out to do. And I think that you know, giving ourselves a little bit of grace, you know, having a little bit of patience in that first couple of years, instead of just that mounting pressure to be doing it exactly right and have the exact niche and know exactly how to talk about it. So that like 1000s of leads, just come storm your door. I don’t I don’t think that happens. For anyone but Carl, but only because he said he’s going to Burning Man. And so it’s just like, you know, like you, you have to like get, you just have to get in there and get started. And be okay with it being kind of screwy for a couple of years, you know, and then and then like, transition to something that feels maybe less screwy

Louis van der Merwe
Reagan, I love that because it takes away all of the pressure to all of that pressure around,

Dr. Meghaan Lurtz
there’s an immense pressure to just be doing it right from day one. And I talked to hundreds, if not 1000s of financial planners, ones that are very good. And they still don’t know. Just like wills,

Louis van der Merwe
probably quite bad at remembering those relationships, the ones that worked and the ones that didn’t work. And I like what you’re saying, like create this, create the data. And then you can go back and say, Okay, what does this what is this telling me? Like? Is there a theme? Is the story coming through? Yeah. Like, are you hearing people doing this? Like, are they? Are they tagging? Okay, we found

Dr. Meghaan Lurtz
out? Really? Yeah, I mean, and that’s one of the things that’s hard is that, you know, financial planning in and of itself is like a very siloed profession, people are lonely. And we don’t talk to each other as I think that’s becoming less of a thing. I think we are finding pockets of communities, whether it’s life planners, or XY Planning Network, or the transition is or the therapists like, people are finding other the tax nerds, like, you know, people are finding other people to come together and talk about the good stuff and the bad stuff, you know, what’s worked and what’s not. One thing that I’ve heard a lot lately, and I, again, I’m not quite sure, just like if it’s the group of people that I’m hanging out with, or what but I’ve talked to a lot of financial advisor men that are about my age. So there, they’ve got to be in their late 30s, early 40s. And they have all been talking about having a mentor and and just like another guy who was doing you know, financial planning, kind of like them, but yet kind of different and, and they have really learned a lot, you know, from that relationship, being able to share woes, and being able to talk about prospecting and being able to talk about like, what’s your financial plan look like? My financial plan looks like. And I think that that’s great. You know, I know that that is what happens at Kansas State University. It’s also what happens at Columbia, because we’re teaching masters students, or I’m teaching masters students primarily at those universities, if not PhD students. And so oftentimes, these are individuals that already have their practice, they like they’re already have their CFP. And yes, we are teaching them like other skills and knowledge and things like that related to the doing of financial planning. But the other thing that is beautiful is just, you now have these five classes, eight weeks each, where you’re pretty much in the same cohort with these, you know, 20 other people. And so you are learning about their practice, and they’re learning about your practice, and, you know, you’re connecting with each other. It’s just the peer to peer learning and the peer to peer knowledge transfer. Is is amazing to watch. And I think I mean, again, I believe that the stuff that we’re teaching is important and you know, school matters. But I think that the friendships, relationships, the learnings that they have from each other practitioner to practitioner is by far the important part of those programs.

Louis van der Merwe
I want to talk a little bit more about this mentorship, idea, specifically advisors that have been maybe, you know, slightly longer thinner, and are thinking about how do I grow my business? We’ve seen it in South Africa, typically, with people starting out, right, they would be partnered with a mentor that would teach them predominantly sales skills, but what you’re talking about is something different. For people that might think hey, I could be I could be a mentor to someone else, like what are the what are the things that you would look for in a, in a good mentor?

Dr. Meghaan Lurtz
Someone that you can be honest with? I know that that sounds may be obvious, but like you, you have to want to share like mentors and mentees. It’s a symbiotic relationship. It’s not just like an A knowledge dump on you. Like there should be information transfer both ways. And it’s important that that relationship can be open, open and honest about like, whoo, I had a rough quarter You know, I need to talk about that, or, you know, there’s been family things that have happened, and I need to talk about that. So just one having somebody that you feel you can really be honest with. So maybe similar to even a well, another thing that matters, I think, is that you have maybe similar values. And again, that may sound very obvious, but like, if you’re a fee only planner, not that you can’t work with somebody that, you know, isn’t a fee only planner, but you’re going to, there’s the things about the way that you do financial planning that are going to make more sense to this other person. And so, I think that’s important. Those are probably the two big ones, you know, because it’s not that it’s not even necessarily important that you do everything the same, you know, that there really maybe should be some disagreement, you know, between the two of you. And that that right, you know, that that mix, about just learning different ways, you know, the as the expression goes, maybe, like, I’m assuming this is a universal expression, but I don’t know now that I’m thinking about, I don’t know what the expression is, and will be in Spanish there. I think that’s weird. You said it more than one way to skin a cat, you know, like, I find

Louis van der Merwe
My cat’s scratching at the door. She’s not listening.

Dr. Meghaan Lurtz
A lot of the stuff that I write about in terms of psychology, like I like you mentioned, life planning, and George kinder, who I love. But I look at his questions. And I think, you know, I’ve seen George like, you know, say things and just like even the way he moves, like when he does it, I, I could never do that. Like, I’m, I’m not George, I look different than George, I act different than George. And so like, when I walk into a room, I don’t, I may command the room still, but I’m going to command it in a different way. And so under, like his life planning questions, those three questions that he asked to dream, a freedom question, and then the, you’re going to die in five years question, and then you’re going to die tomorrow question. Those are amazing. But I don’t know that many planners that are like, oh, yeah, that feels supernatural. I love asking those, you know, like, people are like, I’ve heard they’re interesting, I definitely want to try them. And so when I wrote about them, I wrote about the underpinnings, like, why does this work? You know, when George says this, what’s going on in this person’s brain? And could there be something else that you could ask that might also get that going in someone’s brain, but then you don’t have to, like, be George, you can be you and still get it done. And so I think that it’s very useful to talk to other people that may be again, have the same values as you, you know, have and you can be open with them. But that you’re talking regularly about how you baby, you both go at the same issue, maybe in slightly different ways. And that’s kind of like the science and the art, as we say, you know, a financial planning, there’s lots of different ways to do this. And no way is necessarily like the silver bullet. And you know, and I was talking about me and how I’m different from George, but George’s clients are probably different from like, my clients, and what works for my clients versus what works for Georgia’s clients might be very different. So there’s, there’s just the dynamic of yourself, there’s the dynamic between you and your clients. And these are things that are different from one financial advisor to another, and to have the opportunity to like try different stuff, talk about what we’re talking about what didn’t hear from this other person about what they tried and what worked and didn’t work that just the the amount of knowledge that can be generated from that the understanding of, you know, not even if you’re necessarily collecting data, but just it doesn’t have to be just like this. What I love Michael, I love Michael think he is one of the smartest, loveliest people I’ve ever met in my life. I can tell you many times, I have written articles, and Michael dis writes in the site like in the notes, I would not say that. So like, even between Michael and I who believe the same things like I’m not Michael Michael is not me, what I could say to my client is not what Michael would say to his. But if we can all understand like, you know, some of these underlying factors, then it no longer matters if it’s Michael’s way or my way. Like, it just becomes like this is what it means to be human. If you want to pull this lever. Here’s a bunch of different ways to do it. Pick the one that makes the most sense for you. There was some great research that was done by Dr. Sonia looter and Dr. Grable. And they were looking at sort of like the stress and anxiety of the financial advisor. And then and so they measured that with like, finger stuff, you know, and what they found was that those advisors that were more nervous, this transferred to their clients. And so like, again, if you like, I’m not like Georgia. Questions are amazing. But if you walk in there and you’re like, here we go. And you know, you’re nervous about asking that question that’s basically like, Hey, you’re dead? You know, tell me like, tell me what how do you feel about that? If you’re nervous, your clients gonna get nervous. And, and maybe a little bit of nerves is okay, but not a lot, you know, some of the research that we did on the Kitsis platform, we looked at personality types darker or dark, Dr. Derek SARP. And I And Michael, we’re looking at personality types, the big five. And, of course, we found that those advisors that are less neurotic and more calm, they tended to be the better advisors. And, you know, so it makes sense when you hear it out loud, like this is not rocket science or anything like that. But it’s really important to understand that there is data that actually backs that up, you know, from slightly different perspectives from Dr. Darker looter and Grable. But also Derek and myself, you know, finding similar patterns that how comfortable you are, that advisor matters immensely to how comfortable the client is

Louis van der Merwe
making this drills back down into knowing yourself know, having a mentor getting to understand what it is that you’re good at. But I’m wondering how much of this is kind of client expectations? Like, what if your clients not ready for these questions are not expecting it? Or is there a way to prime clients who say, hey, when, when we have these conversations, this is what you can expect?

Dr. Meghaan Lurtz
Yeah, I think that goes back to even what we were talking about earlier, that it’s one thing to be the asker. No, it’s another thing to be the person that has to respond. And if you’ve never met with a financial planner before, and like you think that they’re going to ask you about your 401 K, your retirement account, which is can be scary enough to be like, oh, there’s only this much money in it, you know, feeling like there maybe should be another 100,000? Not like so that already feels yucky, you know, like

Louis van der Merwe
other people have.

Dr. Meghaan Lurtz
Okay, yeah. But then for them to say something like the Kinder questions, you’re just like, Whoa, I wasn’t ready for that, you know, like not that it’s not a good question. But the people that can really catch people off guard. And I think that we sometimes forget that, you know, as the financial advisor, because most financial advisors don’t have a financial advisor that have like, planned them. And so, you know, to just to understand that whole experience from start to finish to be in that vulnerable chair is, is a is a hard one. And I think that, yeah, it’s about knowing yourself, but it’s also about just really trying to as much as you can, you know, step into how vulnerable that can be for clients, you know, a common common thing that I tell financial advisors to do. And actually, George for whatever, you know, says the opposite. But always tell people what you’re going to ask them, like, you know, send them an email that’s like, hey, you know, thanks for like, signing up, I can’t wait to meet you. On Tuesday, you know, February 21, at three o’clock, you know, here, here’s three things that we’re going to talk about, here’s three questions that I’m actually going to ask you that a, they’ll maybe think about it and give you a better answer than like, I don’t know, or yeah, I hope to retire. You know, like, people haven’t often been given the space to really think about financial goals and things like that. And so they either will answer with, I don’t know, or a lot of times they’ll answer with very broad things that again, they think they’re supposed to say, or, you know, that, like, they think this will make them happy. And I don’t mean that to sound like prospects and clients are dumb, but we, we haven’t given them the space, it’s typically not part of any society that I’ve ever met to talk about money and to talk about goals and to talk about life and things like, those things are just not done. And so they’re doing that, for the first time in a financial planning office talking to essentially a total stranger, you know, about things that are very, very personal. And then we asked them what they’re gonna regret when they die. And you’re just like, there may, there may be a better way to set that up. You know, like I. And so I definitely think anytime you can send a note to the client and say, Hey, this is what we’re going to talk about. This also matters like not only for the vulnerability thing, but it matters to adult learning. You know, like when you think about how adults learn, which is different than how kids learn, it’s really important to sort of set that table to so whether you make like a little loom video, and you’re like, hey, you know, I’m Megan and I love to talk about divorce. And like, you know, here’s the things that we’re going to talk about. And, you know, here’s kind of like what our financial planning software looks like. And it’s, you know, just like a 20 minute little snippet just to tell them, who are you and what are you going to talk about, and what are some things we’re going to show Have them so that when they actually didn’t arrive at the meeting, they may have thought a little bit about like the answer. So probably a better answer. They may, they’re not really going to be surprised about some of the technology that we use. So instead of just like watching and being like, Oh, this thing’s happening in front of me, and not really being able to generate questions in the moment, I mean, I’ve even tried this with my students, that instead of doing a live lecture, I record all my lectures, I’m sure some students just watch them that full time speed, like, you know, three times speed like that, just because they don’t want to hear me talk, that’s fine. But you know, and then when we have class, part of their homework is to turn in questions that they had based on the lecture, and then that’s what we do in live class, we talk about the questions or we talk about a case study, you know, that would matter, and there’s a lot more engagement. And I have even looked at test scores, test scores have gone up since I started doing that. And I think that it all goes back to this idea of, of how adults learn, you know, how people like to communicate, you know, trying to trying to work, trying to counteract a little bit some of that anticipation, anxiety that people have, you know, trying to hold that space for people to be vulnerable, but you know, give them the information that you’re going to be asking them about, and then for the adviser to also be stepping into that confidence, like, you don’t need to worry about like, presenting something, you know, like you’ve we’ve done that part. Now. You know, we’re going to ask you some questions. I think that can really help a lot, and can really change the types of conversations that we’re having and the level of engagement in particular that we get from clients. I mean, isn’t that I get asked that a lot too. Well, you know, I had all these meetings and the client signed up, and then we had our six month review, and nobody did anything. Yeah, I’m sure they didn’t

Louis van der Merwe
I mean, it’s wonderful. How are you like bringing down the anxiety levels? I’m just thinking someone that doesn’t know what to expect, they can see. They could feel like you’re engaging all of the senses. It’s I mean, it makes complete sense yet. We’re not seeing that we’re not we’re not seeing people using it. And I guess that’s part of having these conversations around tasting it, because the technology’s there.

Dr. Meghaan Lurtz
Oh, yeah. He made them have to be difficult, or Yeah, yeah, I think that? Well, I mean, more research needs to be done in financial planning. And on financial planners, and on actual financial planning relationships, so it’s not I wouldn’t necessarily I will put all of the onus of advisors not knowing to do that on myself as an educator and a researcher, within financial planning, you know, people go to school to be financial planners, and unfortunately, our textbooks don’t yet have that research. And that’s my fault, you know, as an educator, as a researcher, and I want to make that better. But yeah, it’s moments like this where these ideas are, you know, creeping into advisors minds, and they’re like, Yeah, you know, I do kind of, say the same thing. For the most part, you know, in this particular meeting, maybe it would be better if I just like, recorded part of that, and then told the client, hey, we’re going to talk about this stuff. Here’s a recording on it, you know, come up with a couple of questions, send them to me, we’re going to cover that. And I say, I will. I know because I’ve talked to quite a few financial planning firms that do it. And they really liked the results.

Louis van der Merwe
It’s like one of those things once you’ve done that you can’t go back not doing anything like using a calendar booking system. You can’t you can’t go back to the old way doing it. Like what what are you experiencing with with in person meetings? Because, you know, there’s been this shift like a lot of online meetings yet. In South Africa. When we talk to financial planners, the quality of the in person meetings are not that great. I can equality in person ones are not relative, the in person meetings, like people are not arranging their offices in a way that’s conducive for these conversations, right? They’re not paying attention to all of the different elements. They might have a drinks menu, but that’s pretty much weird things that will

Dr. Meghaan Lurtz
get me in there. So I so actually, Dr. Sonia looter who did the study with Grable they did another study where they did kind of like they set up offices like therapists offices, so like a couch and a table or at least if you want to think of it like a therapist, like a like a living room, you know, more comfortable there’s a couple of couches there’s a couple chairs, there’s, you know, maybe a little like side table, but nothing like I mean, you know, the the advisor and the client, certainly the advisor is not sitting behind like a big old desk, with the client, you know, on the other side, like that’s not happening. And just doing that, you know, changing the office itself again lowers to anxiety for the client, which then can help them to open up more, you know, can help them to express a little bit better when it’s when the power dynamic is seen through the furniture. It makes people uncomfortable, you know, like that, that makes people uncomfortable. So just thinking yeah, about how your physical office is arranged. And if it you know, studies show that if it looks more like a therapists office or like a living room, then there’ll be lower anxiety, and you’ll probably end up having better conversations,

Louis van der Merwe
this theme of the kind of lowering anxiety makes makes so much sense, right? You just want someone to feel comfortable, so you can have better quality conversations, right? I’m thinking back to a few meetings I’ve had, where the prospect or the client would say, I’m not going to switch on my video today. Because I don’t, I don’t feel that great. Like, I’m happy to have an online meeting, but I just feel a bit safe and not having the video on. Are you seeing any research around how online meetings or maybe having better quality conversations or different types of conversations in the financial planning space?

Dr. Meghaan Lurtz
I clear, necessary? Well, I know that Dr. McCoy with a bunch of doctrine called Dr. random coin, she’s at Kansas State with me, basically, the Megan’s run Kansas State, we, she has done some research with some of her graduate students, you know, looking at the research on teletherapy. And like, what, you know, how is teletherapy working for therapy clients, and there were there was lower anxiety, you know, because like getting to the office and getting in the office and signing up the paperwork, like, all of that falls away, when all you have to do is just like, click your, you know, video. Also, just again, being in your own home, not having to be in like a doctor’s office, you know, oftentimes feels or brings lower anxiety, there can also be things that the therapist learns or sees, you know, because they see your home, you know, like a bit crazy in the background. And people are talking about stress, you know, this might be an indication that your whole home environment is a bit stressful. So those are things to think about. And it didn’t really change. Well. I can’t say that the conversations were better, but people were starting the conversations with lower anxiety. And so the way that the conversations happen, the fact that if they needed to cancel last minute, and then reschedule, you know, that was much easier than like, having to go and, you know, to the actual place, and then find out and have to come back. Like that’s, it’s like a whole extra unnecessary step that just kind of stresses people out. And I have I have heard of financial advisors, like, you know, they know when the meeting is, and so then, like, 15 minutes before the meeting, they’ll Uber Eats like some coffee to like the client’s house. And, you know, so then like, doorbell rings, hot coffee is delivered, you know, now we sit down and like, have a conversation. And I think like stuff, like, that’s lovely. You know, just being able to, I don’t know if that made the conversation go better. But it sounds nice to surprise and delight. Yeah, exactly. And, and we would do things like that, you know, if they were in our office would be like, you know, here’s a tea or, you know, here’s a warm beverage, there’s just something about holding warm beverages that usually calms people down. And so thinking about those experiences, I have also been told by some financial advisors that they think it’s less distracting to meet online. I don’t know how true that is. Because I certainly have read other research that says the opposite. But maybe if like the limit, a limited number of people were in the room,

Louis van der Merwe
virtual rooms on how many toddlers you have in your household?

Dr. Meghaan Lurtz
That yeah, dogs, toddlers, random cats. Yeah. So but I, again, I really wish we had that data, you know, I really wish that we knew what was because because, I mean, I think you’re standing up, I’m standing up right now, you know, we can, like I talk a lot with my hands. I’m like a hand talker. And so I definitely do think that we can read some body language, but a lot of body language is lost. And if people don’t have their cameras on, you know, again, they may be doing that and that makes them feel more comfortable and that’s fine. But still then as the other person you’re missing a lot of cues. This is also assume like and so you know and when people are in your office, you know, you can see did they like turn away from you? Or they’re crossing their legs from you? Are they backing up or when you can see some of that on camera but not as much as you could see in person. Again, I think that this also depends on like how much a financial planner is aware or that they’re aware that they’re watching the body language to try to figure out what’s going on. I think some people are better at that than others. And that’s neither here nor there. You’re as humans, we pick that up about each other anyway. But, yeah, we need more research, I definitely think that having the ability to do one or the other is great, you know, because there are still some people that like, they’re just gonna want to see, you know, and that’s fine. Other people are going to be okay with just being able to meet online. And, and that’s, that’s okay, too. So I think having the flexibility of one over the other, but Yeah, certainly being aware of what makes an in person meeting go, well, being aware of what makes an online meeting go well, to, you know, also really matters. And it all kind of keeps circling back to like this idea of how can we lower anxiety, you know, how can we sort of set the expectation for either what it’s going to be like in this office, or what it’s going to be like, in the virtual meeting? You know, what are we going to be asking people, What are we going to be talking about? How long is this meeting? Is it stopping and starting on time, one thing that can get kind of tricky with online, that doesn’t happen as much in person is interrupting. People don’t like to be interrupted. And it gets harder and harder. Because again, we have natural body cues that sort of show when a person is done, we’re in person that these are harder to pick up on. When you’re not meeting face to face.

Louis van der Merwe
Meeting this is such a lovely masterclass in thinking about reducing the anxiety. For me, it’s around noting how that meeting was what worked? Did you enjoy engaging with the clients? Did the clients enjoy it? What was the level of anxiety? And maybe it would be helpful to have some kind of framework for us to think about reflecting on a meeting like, yeah, do we just use a scale of like, one out of 10 thing? Okay, what was the specific five wrong?

Dr. Meghaan Lurtz
Questions? So I’m gonna answer that with a yes, but so one thing that we that I talked about in that webinar that I know, that you watched was sort of this lapse. So in teaching, we say, tell them what you’re going to teach them set an agenda, you know, then teach them actually do what you said you were going to do and the agenda, then something else, remind them of what you taught them? was kind of like, did we hit all these wickets? You know, or we do we get through the meeting, but then ask them what they learned? Or ask them if that was enough? Or ask how they thought that class went? Or what in my mind class in you, like for you? How was this meeting? You know, so certainly, I think it’s important, if nothing else, that the advisor reflects on that, you know, what, if you did that, you know, for two weeks, all of your client meetings, rate it, you know, at the end, be honest, like, if it’s a five or a four, like, because you were distracted, or they were tired or whatever, then just know that not everything has to be a 10 out of 10. Like, you know, we want there to be some variation so that we can understand and start thinking about what happened, you know, that was it, you was it them was it where you were whatever, you know, technology wasn’t working. So it’s, it’s okay to have those lower scores, stuff happens. Again, this is just one big experiment, you know, so there’s gonna be stuff that goes wrong. And, you know, so do that for two weeks, you know, like, rate your meetings, but at least a couple of times, you know, especially with those clients that you trust, and you’ve got, like, maybe a closer relationship with them. You can just say, that didn’t mean hey, you know, I have kind of a weird quote, I’m trying a different thing. You know, I listen to this podcast, and they said, to try it, I’m just gonna try. So I have a question for you. And the client will be like, okay, and then you say, All right, I want to know, like, on a scale of one to 1010, being amazing, like the best meeting you’ve had in a month, or one, like, you never want to have a meeting like this again, where were we? What did we do? And they’ll say, they’ll probably because they’re nice, and they like you, they’ll probably say, like, oh, you know, a nine. And so then you say, Well, you know, so then why, like, what would have made it a 10? Like, hey, like, how could this have been a 10? And they may like, say, Oh, well, you didn’t give me a million dollars. Okay, yeah, I did it, you know, if that’s if that’s the thing that separating that expectation for you, you know, if they say an eight No, again, you can always say, Well, what, what would have made it a nine, you know, like, I really, I’m trying to improve my meeting experience. I’m trying to just improve how I connect with clients. You know, this feedback is really important to me, can we have that conversation? Clients will tell you, they will, they will be honest with you, they will not be afraid of it. They don’t think it’s weird. You know, they they are human, they want to have a good meeting, too. Because they don’t want to get to the end and be like this could have been an email. You know, we all feel that way sometimes. And so, it is an incredibly valuable practice for the client and for you to get to the end of the meeting and say, you know, how was this you know, the We do what we set out to do. Are you feeling fulfilled, you know, having been here, what whatever the point of the meeting was, and, you know, then ask them to rate the meeting. And there will be times that you rate the meeting differently than they did. And again, it’s important to understand whatever they said, if it’s a seven, why wasn’t an a, you know, get that feedback. But then also, if you thought it was like a nine, you know, you don’t need to tell the client that you can just think about that by yourself. Like, well, that’s funny. I thought I did a nine, I’m a nine, you know, that. Don’t do that. But, but thinking about it afterwards, for sure. And also, you know, this goes back to kind of like the mentee mentee thing, mentor mentee thing. If you have another financial planner, whether it’s a peer planner, or something like this, you know, in the meeting with you ask them to rate it to, you know, it’s it is about the collective experience of being in this meeting, not just your experience. And then if there’s like…

Louis van der Merwe
We can learn from like workout apps that tells you afterwards, how did you think this workout went, like even Saussurea? So start something, I’m definitely going to implement that in our business and talking, reflecting on the meeting and referring back to it and seeing what began, this has been a wonderful conversation for people that want to read some of the articles want to watch some of the webinars that you posted, like what’s the best place to connect with you?

Dr. Meghaan Lurtz
The best place is the kitces.com. website. That’s where most of the things that I write are. That’s where most of the webinars that I do are, that’s the best place to find it.

Louis van der Merwe
Thank you so much. I wish you all the best with your classes and your future research. And please continue with the wonderful content that you’ve been putting out. Thank you.