One of the most important decisions that you can make is to keep your financial life simple. Our world is fraught with complexities, and, when it comes to the financial industry, we are probably second in line to the legal profession, when it comes to complicating our client’s financial lives.
Complexity paralyzes investors and would be investors, from being able to make informed decisions. Simplicity on the other hand, is the starting point to creating meaningful change in your clients’ eyes.
Complexity is often a “window dressing” which gives the person communicating, a sense of power. In turn, the listener, mesmerized by all the gobbledegook, capitulates “and accepts that the advisor must know what they are doing. In many of the cases they do, but they forget the the true measure of a client advisor relationship, is based on trust. And, trust is created by having both parties on the same page.
The following is an excerpt from a speech given by Mr. Postman at the German Informatics Society, sponsored by IBM, on October 11th 1990.
“The great English playwright and social philosopher George Bernard Shaw once remarked that all professions are conspiracies against the common folk.
He meant that those who belong to elite trades -physicians, lawyers, teachers, and scientists - protect their special status by creating vocabularies that are incomprehensible to the general public.
This process prevents outsiders from understanding what the profession is doing and why - and protects the insiders from close examination and criticism. Professions, in other words, build forbidding walls of technical gobbledegook over which the prying and alien eye cannot see.”
What are your opinions on the matter? Cheers.
Senior Wealth Advisor
Source: Neil Postman, German Informatics Society, 11 Oct 90, Stuttgart