It Happened to Me

There are few things more heartening to a young planner with egg on his face and foot in his mouth than a story of a successful planner who botched something similar and lived to tell the tale. We asked a few experienced planners to share a few mishaps from their early days.

Charles Parker’s favorite occurred when a co-worker tried to sell flood insurance to a client. Normally this is a good idea for residents of the area, says the Houston-based planner, except that the client lived near the top of a high-rise condominium.

Parker’s own firm occasionally had mishaps of another kind: Back when Parker Financial Advisors had a word processing department that customized master documents, “we occasionally would have a report slip through with another client’s name embedded in the text–or, worse yet, another client’s spouse,” he says. “For example, ‘Tom and Carol Smith’ would then get a plan that advised Tom to ‘name your spouse Debbie’ as a beneficiary.”