To understand the big picture, you have to go back 10,000 years to the dawn of this experiment we call civilisation. Before that, human beings roamed the earth at will, living at the top of the food chain, in what we now call a hunter-gatherer subsistence existence.
Then, for some bizarre reason, people voluntarily gave up a lifestyle where they only worked three to five hours a day in order to laboriously build permanent structures and tend herds of animals, and eventually to write poetry and manufacture and build companies that require accounting services and create a social structure so complicated that you need a financial planner just to figure out your investment options. Today, working 10-hour days is not uncommon.
What motivated people to give up the hunter-gatherer life for what we call civilisation? The ancient promise was that someday, if we work at this hard enough for long enough, our children’s children will be able to live a life of fulfilment and leisure. That doesn’t mean work will stop, but it does mean that people will only engage in activities that energise and interest them, which they would never want to retire from. And they will have time for creative and leisure activities.
The interesting thing is that long-awaited day has finally, after 10,000 years, arrived. We’re there. And we are all stuck at the door. We are genetically and culturally predisposed to keep our noses to the grindstone and behave as if we are subsistence creatures.
So where do the financial planners come into this? For the last 20 years or so, the financial planning profession has created workable tools that address the root causes of poverty.
The profession has helped people spend less than they make, and invest intelligently and with purpose rather than random day-trading or the destructive fear-and-greed cycles. Financial planners have mastered the powerful secret that any goal can be achieved if it is broken down into small, incremental, manageable parts — and they have applied this to retirement planning and the education of their clients’ children.
Now financial planners are the only profession with the means to help people recognise the relationship between their personal, lifestyle planning goals and their financial resources. Financial planners are the only profession that has the initial interview, where they ask a client what he or she wants to accomplish in life.
In the next 10 to 30 years, our species will give birth to a society of fulfilment, as different from civilisation as civilisation was from the hunter-gatherer societies.
The next challenge for financial planners is to cross over that threshold themselves and become the first citizens of this new age, to create for themselves lives of fulfilment. And then to create procedural tools that help others cross that threshold and enter this life of fulfilment.
Bob Veres is a leading journalist and commentator onthe financial services industry in the US.
