Meeting with a financial advisor for the first time isn’t easy for most people. Having to open up and share such a personal part of your life creates anxiety, and then you add in the concern that you’re walking into a sales trap. It can be a bad experience if you don’t work with the right people.

That’s something we’ve been very aware of through the years and put a process in place that allows anyone to come in and meet with the team without any obligation for doing business. We call it the Money Map Review and we talk about it all the time on the podcast, and that’s because we take a lot of pride in providing this service to anyone that wants to start the conversation about their finances.

On this episode of the Money Wisdom podcast, Joel Johnson will take you through this proprietary process that he helped create more than a decade ago. We designed the process and later published a book that also takes you through it, and today we’re going to take you through each step so there aren’t any surprises when you meet us for the first time.

The first thing you need to do is set an appointment. That can be done right here on the website, and we’re offering both Zoom appointments and in-person meetings.

After the appointment is set, we send out a confirmation letter through the mail. Yes, we actually send a letter through the mail, but we want to get this information into your hands. Included is a short book that can help prepare you a little bit for the appointment.

From there it’s time to come in for your appointment. We suggest you bring in a tax return and financial statements to make sure we have all the information we need to review your situation. If you feel uneasy, you don’t have to pull them out, but we suggest having them so that we can be very thorough.  

It’s important to keep in mind that the first meeting is just for getting to know each other. We want to find out who you are, where you want to go, and what obstacles are preventing you from reaching that point. Once we know that, we can build a Money Map to lay out your financial path. But there’s no business transacted in that first meeting. If we discover any challenges during the meeting, then you can decide whether you want us to help you solve them. If not, you’ll have your Money Map built and it’s yours to take with you.

To help you get an idea of how it’s applied, Joel will also share an example on the show about how we’ve worked with clients to overcome the challenges we found in finances. There’s a long list of these success stories but don’t take our word for it. Come in and get your complimentary review and see what plan we can design for you.

Let’s get started with the show. You can listen to it by using the audio player above and click on the timestamps to skip to a specific topic of conversation.

[1:39] – More than a decade doing the Money Map process

[3:36] – Even simple questions require a thorough review

[5:22] – The steps we take you through

[8:31] – How do we get paid?

[11:04] – Example of this process in action

[13:21] – How you can start this process

[14:48] – The Money Map book

[16:14] – The culture of Wall Street

[18:09] – How Wall Street impacts us

[20:32] – If you have anxiety about your money

Thanks for listening to this episode. We’ll be back again next week for another show.