Short video by Chad Owen (Annuity Agents Academy) using an open-pit coal mine analogy to explain the importance of thorough fact-finding in financial planning. He emphasizes digging deep into clients' goals, expenses, assets, emergency savings, and retirement timing so advisors can design reliable lifetime income solutions. The talk stresses patience and thoroughness during the fact-finding process.
Hello, Chad Owen with Annuity Agents Academy. I like to live life through analogies. In other words, a lot of times I live experiences or explain things through analogies. And I've driven by this pit quite a few times. This is south of San Antonio. It's actually an open pit coal mine. And what this big machine is doing is it's obviously just digging up the overburden and it's getting down to the coal. And the coal is what supplies the energy for the power plant that's not too far away from here. And I kind of look at that like fact finding. Fact finding is really important when we're going through fact finding. As you can see, there's a bunch of different equipment behind there. There's bulldozers, there's dump trucks, there's a huge bucket shovel. I mean, there's all sorts of tools back there to get down to the material which supplies energy. And when I'm fact finding, I do a lot of different things to get that fact finding done right. In other words, I have to have the right lead source to get me in front of the right client that I actually can help. So when I get that client on the phone, the first thing I'm doing is I'm finding out what they need, what their goals are, how old are they, when do they want to retire. But then when I actually meet with them face to face, I'm going into an in depth fact finder. I'm going over everything from expenses to where they have their funds, to how much they have in emergency funds and savings to what their monthly expenses are. I'm going into every little detail because I want to make sure that when I'm digging up the material, I'm finding what supplies them energy. And energy to me is what provides income for them. Income for the rest of your life is energy. Because obviously if you don't have enough income, it's going to stress you out. And there's not a lot of things you can do if you don't have money to do anything. So fact finding is all about digging up everything and finding out what's important to them. Be very, very thorough when you're doing fact finders because our, it's a big honor really when someone says, hey, I need you to help me figure out my plan for the rest of my life. And we get to do that. But don't. As you can see, they're not moving fast. It takes them a long time to do this. So sometimes when we're going through a fact finding process, it takes a long time. But don't be afraid to take that time with the client. It's a they, they've spent like this coal in the ground for many, many years and it's been sitting there. Well, these people spend many, many years building their retirements up. So it's our responsibility to take the time, be very thorough, dig deep to be able to get the energy, in other words, the income that will help supply their retirement and help them not worry about their financial status or their financial income or how they're going to retire. We can help secure that if we do. A very thorough, very fact finder. Thank you so much. I appreciate your time. Have a great day.
