Wealth Planning Insights
Your Personal Relationship with Your Advisor Matters More Than You Think
Peter Faust, CFP®, April 2025
Family financial planning demands a lot of technical expertise from your advisor—coordinating overlapping goals, implementing long-term investment and tax strategies, and facilitating estate planning and charitable giving activities. But to me, there is an equally important piece of the equation I think is sometimes overlooked:
Does your advisor really know you? I am being completely serious.
The personal side of the client-advisor relationship matters just as much as the technical side. Your advisor could give you every kind of investment performance report or Monte Carlo simulation that they can devise, but if your advisor does not really know you, none of that information will truly resonate with you.
One of the most important things your advisor can do, for your financial success, is show you that they understand what matters to you, and how you relate to the people and causes that are important to you.
What does money mean to you? What are you excited about? What keeps you awake at night? How do you want to be remembered?
I could hand these questions to you in an impersonal questionnaire. Or I could get to know you and what makes you tick, and build a genuine relationship to earn your trust so that you feel comfortable to open up. In my experience, getting to know you and building a relationship has a much better success rate than reducing your financial life down to a one-size-fits-all, standardized financial planning process.
The next time you meet with your advisor, pay attention to how they interact with you. Do they ask thoughtful questions about your life, your priorities, and the same about your family? Do they actively listen and respond in a way that makes you feel understood? These small but important cues can indicate whether your advisor is a good fit for you and your family.
An advisor who really knows you and your family can become your trusted sounding board for when you have something on your mind and want candid and unbiased feedback. They can help you think through issues where the solution recognizes equal treatment and fair treatment are not always the same thing. They can facilitate discussion between generations who have different objectives. And they can even help you recognize and understand when it is the right time to push a particular topic and when it is not.
This is all to say that, if you’re looking for financial guidance, your personal relationship with your advisor has a tangible influence on your family’s ability to achieve its goals. Work with an advisor who listens, asks good questions, earns your trust and has your back, because everything you achieve together will stand on that foundation.