These uncertain times have created a strain on the amount of good activity coming through for many financial advisors. More than ever, it is crucial to focus on the right strategies that will provide the best service for our clients and prove to be time well spent for our businesses. In this episode of Money Script Monday, Sal presents a simple tool you can use to discover your client's current financial plan and identify areas that need improvement.

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Video transcription

Hello. My name is Sal Mendoza, and welcome back to Money Script Monday.

Today's focus is the 10 essential elements for landing bigger cases. I want to go ahead and I want you to think for a second the last time you went to your doctor.

And I'm not talking about a bad experience but a good experience.

The kind that you walked in, you shook hands, you sat down, he asked you what was wrong, you explained that you had a pain in your abdomen and then from there, he started to ask you a series of questions.

How long? On a scale of 1 to 10, how much does it really hurt? , what's the last thing that you ate? Have you been in any contact sports?

He'll start to address those questions and then he'll typically come over and start to press. And at the end of the day, he's going to write a prescription and then eventually, hopefully, that pain is gone.

That's exactly what we do with financial planning.

You meet with the client. You ask a series of questions. You get good answers.

We create a report, a wealth report, a Retirement Income Shortfall Analysis. We backfill that in with products.

And then, all of a sudden, the pain is taken away because now, that client knows exactly what's going to happen in his retirement.

That's what we're going to be focusing on and that is exactly how you also write large cases, which is to fill up this assessment form.

So, let's just go over a few of some of these really important things that are necessary.

Family Profile

Family. Obviously, we want to know if he's married. We want to know if he has kids. We want to know how many kids? How old are they?

We're thinking, "Are we going to have to provide college planning? Is there going to be maybe a legacy?"

Maybe he loves his kids and we want to provide a legacy. Maybe he doesn't like his kids and maybe we don't have to provide that legacy.

Income

All his income. We need to know how much money he's making.

We want to know when he's planning to retire. We want to know exactly how much income he's thinking in retirement.

We want to know what the inflation in his mind, what that looks like. We want to know what his tax rate looks like. We want to know today, what is his monthly expenses.

Property & Mortgage

Mortgage. We want to know how long he has owned his house. What is the balance? What is the interest rate?

There could be an opportunity there for a HELOC, or reverse mortgage, or things of that nature.

Life Insurance

We want to find out if he has any life insurance. Does he have an annuity? Does he have a life insurance? Does he have a term insurance?

Current Assets

Any current assets that he has: checking, savings. Typically, people will have a little bit, three to six months, put into those.

Qualified Accounts

Qualified accounts. This is typically where we see a lot of opportunities.

I'll stop here for a quick second because we see a lot of opportunities there because that is the number one way to retire today.

You work, and now, all of a sudden, you're stuffing money into your 401(k) because you're getting a match.

Because most of the pensions don't exist. There are not too many people who have an opportunity to take advantage of a pension, so the retirement is on us.

We're putting money away on a, typically, a weekly or monthly basis and the companies want to help us so they offer some kind of match.

So, we want to find out how much you're contributing.

The other thing, too, is we want to find out is that 401(k) from a current employer or is it an orphaned 401(k) from someone else that maybe it's just sitting solo over there and it's just not doing anything other than it's being managed.

Defined Benefits

Typically, I don't have any defined benefit plans. I rarely ever have, of every 10 clients that I see, maybe 1, maybe 2, has some kind of pension.

Otherwise, there's nothing there. Sometimes, they'll have an annuity which serves just like a pension.

Current Liabilities

Current liabilities. We'll typically see a car or two on there for the husband and for his spouse.

Future Cash Needs

Future cash needs. It's important to plan ahead so one of the questions you always want to ask is:

"Do you have a son and daughter? While there's a good chance you're going to be paying for your daughter's wedding, so, , what does that look like?"

It's obviously hard to anticipate that but you're probably going to want to throw in some money, so we want to look at that.

We want to find out if there's going to be a remodel to a house.

I recently remodeled my place, very expensive to remodel a place today, so we want to make sure that we're asking those kinds of questions.

Additional Information

And then finally, this additional information. It's important to ask questions. So one of the questions there:

"What are the top three things that your retirement has to do for you?" What does that look like?

Sometimes when you put them on the spot, they don't know exactly what to say so you can nudge them along:

Does that money need to be there to cover your essential expenses on a monthly basis? Of course, it does, right?

So, we want to go ahead and jot that down. But you're going to find out that there's going to be different responses for different kinds of clients that I work with.

And so, if you're planning to land larger cases, it is important that you fill out the assessment form from the top all the way to the bottom.

I'm about to celebrate 18 years here at LifePro Financial, I'm very grateful for that. One of the things that I still notice that I would say that 70% of advisors still send me a quote request.

Just an email with the first and last name, the date of birth, the health rate, and, how much money they're going to put into a product.

And I look at this and that's fine, we'll run that. But when I look at that, I see the age, and I see that the client is 52 years old.

I immediately know that I need to pick up the phone, and I need to call them up, and I need to actually have them fill out an assessment form.

It's mandatory that if you're working with me, that if you're over 50, that you need to fill this out. Why? Because we need to look at a comprehensive plan.

Because we need to look at social security. We need to look at annuity opportunities. We need to look at permanent insurance, like indexed universal life or second-to-die.

We need to look at long-term care, or a hybrid, or maybe an ABR built into an indexed universal life.

And then, of course, we also want to look if there's an opportunity to put some of that money under management using LifePro Asset Management.

And when you fill out these forms, what will happen for the 30% who actually do that, they always seem to write the larger cases.

So, today is all about writing larger cases and these 10 elements behind that, I only went over a few.

It is important that you complete that form, send it over, and by doing that, we can provide that prescription for your clients so they don't have any pain.

My name is Sal. Thank you for letting me share.

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• Client Assessment Form