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June 17, 2015 at 05:55 AM
Surprisingly, I only got a couple of comments to my last blog, Luring Millennials Is a Waste of Advisors’ Time, instead of the flood of feedback that I’m just “too old to get it” that I was expecting. And I found one of them to be quite intriguing. It was posted by Deborah Fox, CEO of the Fox Financial Planning Network and AdvisorTouch.com, in San Diego. Here’s what she had to say:
“Bob, I respectfully disagree with you. I started in the business in my mid-20s, and built from scratch a book of clients that I could relate to, which were mainly millennials… …Within a few years, I was earning over $100,000 a year; an income most young advisors would be happy with.”
First, I think we need to establish some definitions here, to be sure we’re all on the same page. According to Wikipedia, the generally accepted age ranges for current demographic groupings in America is as follows:
- We “Baby Boomers” were born between 1946 and 1964: That makes us between 50 years old and 70 years old today.
- The “Generation Xers” were born between 1964 and 1984: That makes them between 30 years old and 50 years old today.
- The “Millennials” were born between 1984 and 2004: That makes them between 10 years old and 30 years old today.
Now, a quick look on FoxFinancialPlanningNetwork.com tells us that Deborah has been a “practicing financial advisor” for over 25 years.” In the interest of discretion, I’ll let you do the math, but when we add that to the above statement that’s she started her business “in my mid-twenties,” it’s pretty clear that her first clients were “GenXers” (and probably some “Baby Boomers) rather than “Millennials.” (Although I couldn’t confirm this, as she wasn’t available at the time of this writing.)
Still, her point that she initially built her business by working with clients who (like herself) were in their 20s is interesting. Fox goes on to describe the business model she used to generate her five-figure income: “I created a service model that fit their needs: debt and cash flow planning, income protection, early stage investing in mutual funds, etc.”
I take this to mean that she sold her young clients insurance and mutual funds, and probably threw in basic financial planning as a loss leader. After all, how much could the investment portfolios of 20-somethings generate in AUM fees?
To answer that question, I refer you to Melanie Waddell’s June 1 story on ThinkAdvisor, Millennials: Ignore Them at Your Peril, about a panel discussion on the subject at the recent ICI Annual conference. Among other things, the panelists revealed that the 70 million Millennials “have between $1 trillion and $2 trillion in assets.” That may sound like a huge number, but when one does the math, it works out to an average $14,286 each.
However, that still sounds pretty high to me: considering that the panelists also said only 63% of Millennials have jobs, and that “seven out of 10 of them have student debt of roughly $30,000.” (When I was 30 years old, I didn’t have $14,000 in assets, and I didn’t know many people my age who did—although you could of course argue that I wasn’t hanging out in the right circles). And the stat that “35% actually own a home,” sounds ridiculously high to me.
