How to Set Funding Goals for What Matters to Clients

By Michael Schwabe, Director of Customer Success

Everyone knows that it's one thing to set a goal—and a whole different exercise to reach it. After all, there’s a reason why almost no one completes their New Year’s resolutions.

Just setting a goal isn’t enough. Every goal needs a defined plan and a process along with it, and that’s true for financial plans too. A goal and a number that a client needs to reach are not enough to make them real for them. 

As their advisor, you need to visually demonstrate their path to progress so you can help them see the light at the end of the tunnel and keep going.

Here’s how you can do that with Target-Maps.

5 Planning Situations That Affect Everyone

There are certain funding goals that almost every family needs to prepare for in life. In Asset-Map, we’ve created these events as pre-set Target Maps so they’re easy to access and remember.

Those five events, or life situations, include:

• Loss of life

• Long-term disability

• Long-term health care

• Education planning

• Retirement

The details of each of these situations will be different for each person you work with, but you should be having conversations about each of these scenarios. How each of these plays out may affect other goals your client has for their life and retirement. 

For example, a long-term disability can throw off the education planning you’ve done for a family’s children. 

So how do you help your clients prioritize funding their goals in a comprehensive way?

How to Set Funding Goals for What Matters to Your Clients

When setting funding goals with clients, it’s important to focus on progress—not performance.

The focus should be on the present and the future, not the past. You want clients to see “How funded am I today” instead of talking about what rates of return they had last year. That is ancient history.

Clients want to see the summary of where they stand and what they need to do to improve, so start there. Keep their focus on what’s ahead to help them continue to make progress.

In the event of an unexpected life event, though, you want to be prepared. Target-Maps make analyzing those types of situations easy. Simply clone an existing Target-Map to look at different scenarios and see how funding would be affected is something like a long-term disability would occur.

In addition to focusing clients on progress, you also want to direct their attention to what matters most. We recommend organizing each Target-Map in the order of importance to a client; the top funding priority gets the top slot on the page. 

Arranging their funding priorities in this way is a visual way of illustrating which goals they need to think about first. But also, this type of arrangement helps a client to easily see if they have a plan in place for those impactful financial events. 

Using a Target-Map to illustrate how well their plan might work in a financial fire drill can get you both aligned in the right direction.

Other Popular Uses for Target-Maps

Target-Maps can also be helpful when working with clients who own a business, or who need an estate plan. 

A Target-Map can show the need for liquidity if a business partner should leave; or, it could also be used to show funding needed for a clean business exit strategy.

Additionally, you can help illustrate the tax implications of an estate plan using a Target-Map as well. Using a single Target-Map, you can show a client how well-positioned they are to fund their one-year goal, and also their hundred-year goal to see how their legacy will play out after their passing.

By using Target-Maps for estate planning, you can show who’s inheriting money, how much each person will receive, and also illustrate the role of charitable giving in their legacy as well.

The Best Way for Advisors to Illustrate Funding Goals

Target-Maps, with its highly visual design and flexible creative capabilities, are the best way for advisors to plan for and illustrate funding goals.

Build one from a template, create your own from scratch, and give your clients a simple way to know that they’re on the path to financial success.

Click here to get a demo now and see how you can use Target-Maps in your practice.