Ensuring the Best Solutions | May 2002 Managing Money

Ensuring the Best Solutions
(Managing Money)

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No possibilities are overlooked with a comprehensive checklist.

James P. Ruth, CFP

Clients look to you for information and recommendations on financial products, planning tools and techniques that will solve their financial dilemmas. The problem that an advisor faces is the enormous number of possible solutions.

One approach to finding the best solutions is to take a page out of the process the airline industry uses. Before a flight, the pilots walk around the plane to make a visual inspection of the aircraft, looking for problems that could lead to tragedy. But they don't stop there. Next, they sit in the cockpit and go through a thorough checklist of all the instruments and gauges to ensure a safe flight.

Successful advisors do the same thing. After exploring a client's objectives, their risk tolerance and concerns for the future, like the pilots, they make a visual inspection of the situation. Unfortunately, some stop there. That could be a big mistake. They need a formal checklist of all the possible solutions that could positively impact clients reaching their goals, which should be included in the plan with the appropriate recommendations checked off.

This serves several purposes. It significantly reduces the chances of overlooking an important possibility and identifies the recommended solutions as well as others that were considered, but deemed inappropriate at the time.

Our four-page checklist outlines seven categories of possible solutions. The first page is printed below (request a complete checklist by email or phone). Other categories of solutions include retirement planning, education funding, risk management, legal, estate and charitable planning, tax planning and credit/debt management.

James P. Ruth is a registered representative and president of Potomac Financial Group in Gaithersburg, Md. He can be reached at 301-948-3900 or pfgroup@erols.com.

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Ensuring the Best Solutions (Managing Money)

Ensuring the Best Solutions
(Managing Money)