Good Life Conference Edition

Noah Brooks:

Hey, welcome back to Nashville Market enthusiast. I’m Noah Brooks and with me as always Chris needs. How was your weekend here? How was every few days?

Chris Needs:

It was awesome. I’m in a little hot water with the wife because this is her spot. This is where she wants to come. Wait, so she wanted to come and you didn’t bring her down to Nashville. What are we going to do with the kids? But it is a fun town. This is a place we will be back to, man. Darn. Without

Noah Brooks:

A doubt. I had to get a sitter for the dog, but I didn’t have to think about any kids. So to the advisors that are here this weekend and are listening to this, thank you so much. And to the advisors that didn’t get to make it, if you have an opportunity, a one, come to our conference, B one B, come to Nashville. What a great town. We had two days of content and really the whole purpose of holding this was to bring knowledge, tools and usable content to our advisors over the last day or two. And I think we did a pretty good job. I mean, there was always one or two little hiccups here, just a few little things. Not on the tech side, guys, not on the tech side, but a few little things. But overall I think it went really well.

Chris Needs:

Yeah, I mean my favorite part was meeting with our advisors and our partners in person. You don’t get that every day. You get to talk shop for a little while and then you talk personal stuff a little bit. You get to hear about their sports teams and what they’re doing. So it was a great time.

Noah Brooks:

10 advisors that I’ve spoken to 40 or 50 times, but never once had an opportunity to meet ’em in person. I thought I couldn’t agree with you more. Did you have a favorite speaker or topic?

Chris Needs:

I mean, we had a lot of great content, so it’s hard to pick a favorite. We’ll go with that. But I mean I was a big fan of hearing from Matt on Bloomberg a lot. Very smart, interesting guy.

Noah Brooks:

Yeah, well, you know what? This year we did a little bit different in the past. We’ve kind of loaded up on investment speakers and not that there’s anything wrong with that, and we still had a few here, but we really had more practice management. We had some great speakers talking about behavioral finance and I can’t say enough about the enough good things about the Alliance Bernstein Advisor Institute. They’ve been a partner of ours for a number of years. And it’s one of those things where you’re just like the guys that come and talk, they just make this connection that I think some of the other investments are what we do and what advisors do, but the behavioral finance side of it and really understanding it from an advisor relationship, how they interact with the client and addressing the client’s needs. I mean, that’s powerful stuff.

Chris Needs:

Yeah, that’s very impressive. And stuff our advisors can take away. And there were a lot of vendors, technology type things as well where I think there’s several advisors who are going to take that away and check out, maybe do a trial of this or that and then implement that into their practice.

Noah Brooks:

So we heard from Scott Tatum from the Alliance, Bernstein Advisor Institute, and one of the things that he talked about was the holistic planning side, and he gave us a list of the top 10 things that investors were looking for from realistic planning. And you know what wasn’t on that list?

Chris Needs:

What

Noah Brooks:

Investing

Chris Needs:

Investments. That’s right. I do recall. Yeah.

Noah Brooks:

So top two were tax strategy and legal services. Now I’m not in a position to offer legal services, but some of our advisors work closely. Probably a lot of our advisors work closely with an estate planning attorney or something like that. One of the things that he mentioned is that when people are looking for legal services, they’re not necessarily looking for the word estate planning. The investor themselves may not use that word. They want help protecting their assets. They want help protecting their kids. And one of the things that he mentioned that we’ve seen in the industry a lot is when someone’s getting married, there’s a good chance that the parents don’t particularly love the person that they’re getting married.

Chris Needs:

Hopefully in few cases. But it happens.

Noah Brooks:

It happens, right? I mean, I shouldn’t say more often than not, I should say it happens occasionally.

Chris Needs:

Preempting issues like that that could arise.

Noah Brooks:

And so you have somebody who has some net worth and their kids are going to marry somebody else that they don’t necessarily approve of. And so yeah, it’s estate planning, but it’s more about protecting one child or protecting the net worth of the family than just the idea of estate planning

Chris Needs:

And having that plan before there’s issues or troubles.

Noah Brooks:

Yeah. What did he say? He said there’s two times where they come to us or the clients come out and are looking for those legal services before the wedding and when their relationship is getting toxic. And I thought at

Chris Needs:

That point it might be too

Noah Brooks:

Late to protect. Yeah, that was interesting. So really we had some great behavioral finance speakers, and I think I’ve heard this before, but investing nowadays, it is less of a concern than all of those other things For a lot of our clients on the advisor side, we heard about some great technology. We heard from Asset Map, we heard from the CEO of Asset Map, dynamic speaker, kind of a one page financial plan. You can just put everything right there and obviously you’re going to put the data in there, but you’re going to present a one page financial plan or a page and a half to the client where they can see it and just boom, boom, boom. Completely makes sense. Now, I’m not an e-money guy myself. I know we have a lot of advisors out there that do that and you can present as much data as you want to the client, and I think there’s a limit to how much that they can digest. And I don’t know what that limit is. I don’t know if it’s five pages, I don’t know if it’s 10 pages, but it’s one of those things where I know a page and a half is pretty simple.

Chris Needs:

And what I saw with Asset Map is they make it interactive. Now the tech was integrated very well and they can change things on the fly right in front of a client and still makes sense, gives you numbers, gives you the plan. So tools they can take away and drive their meetings more efficiently.

Noah Brooks:

Yeah. One of the things that came out of the advisor success panel, now I hosted that. What did you think?

Chris Needs:

I think I saw a lot of interest and opportunity in sort of the tax side. There’s interesting programs people can use to integrate that and get a full financial picture without going through, find me all these statements and bring them into me now sign off on this and we’ll get that information and we’ll have the whole picture.

Noah Brooks:

What I picked up from it, and I don’t use H lista plan, but what I picked up from the three advisors on the panel was that their key to growth was tax planning. And one of them was using holistic plan. Another advisor was using another plan that I’m not familiar with, and the third advisor was actually old schooling it on a spreadsheet or something. All three of them were growing because of that. But the holistic plan, so Brennan actually came up with a third party software that allows the client to sign off on it and it will upload 10 years worth of tax data into HTA plan and will actually upload the next three automatically or anytime that there is something going on that a document submitted to the IRS, it’s automatically going to feed it right into HTA plan. And I was just like, man, imagine having not to continually ask the client for the taxes, it’s just so you can reduce the time by, I dunno, 20, 3200%, 300% I think was the number that Brennan said. And if that’s the thing that’s driving the growth in all three of those businesses, I mean right. And slowing down the time it takes to actually get that documentation. So pretty powerful stuff for anybody who’s interested in hearing about that particular software. By all means email us market enthusiast@goodlifefa.com. We’ll drop you a line, put you in touch with the right people. We did hear some really good stuff from the fixed income guys over at Voya

Talking about the markets now he was a fixed income guy, but he also got into macro stuff and general economy. It’s

Chris Needs:

All related. You sort of have to, you’d be neglecting half the picture if you didn’t, but yeah, Brett Conway from there did a great job in summing things up, putting it together. And we’ve got a picture on all sides. We had a macro guy who went everywhere and equity international and then followed it up with the fixed income side. We heard a lot

Noah Brooks:

Of points. So the takeaway that I got from Brett, and I can say this now, I don’t know if anybody out there has ever been cruising down the highway and they decide they’re going to step on it and I am not going to put a number out there, but exceeding the speed limit by a dramatic amount and you’re flying down the highway and then all of a sudden you back off and you come down to the speed limit 55 or 60 miles an hour and it feels a lot slower than where you were going. And he was making the point that where we were after Covid was this high ramp of GDP 4 5 6, I think six and a quarter annualized at one point on GDP. And we are slowing down, we’re coming back down to that three to three and a quarter and it feels completely different,

Chris Needs:

Which it would’ve loved prior to Covid. And then yeah, like you said, it feels totally

Noah Brooks:

Different that it’s not bad, it’s the speed limit. It just feels a lot slower than it was a year and a half ago. We don’t know if it’s going to continue to go down or if we’re going to level out in the two and a half to three and a half. It seems like that’s the case. He was making a pretty good point about the consumer continuing to be resilient. Wage inflation was there, which is bad for corporations, but good for

Chris Needs:

Employees, ultimate consumers.

Noah Brooks:

Right? Yeah. And the idea of consumers debt to income has actually gone down since 2019 because of wages rising. And to me that means that the consumer is still going to be resilient. I don’t know what happens in five years or 10 years or anything like that, but in the short term in the next year or two, the consumer is still going to be resilient and that makes a case for a no landing or at the very minimum a soft landing. Right.

Chris Needs:

Yeah. And again, it seems like we’re right at all time highs again and the market is just chugging along. We don’t see any major cracks. One thing he mentioned was spreads are extremely tight, but that’s because the fundamentals are great right now. That’s not

Noah Brooks:

A bad thing. Yeah. We did talk a little bit at the end outside, we talked about Claudia, Sam and her rule. Throw that out there just to remind everybody.

Chris Needs:

So basically Claudia Sam’s rule is that when short-term unemployment spikes significantly higher, half a percent above long-term unemployment that you’ll likely see a slowdown or ultimately a recession. And one thing we kicked around was she didn’t design it to be a recession indicator per se. It was designed to be a government response tool. When this triggers, you need to step in and support the economy to head off a recession. So it’s turned into this recession indicator and was the buzzword back in August when we hit it and triggered it very slightly before getting a good report in September. But we certainly have seen a slight slowdown, but again, it’s not a painful slowdown

Noah Brooks:

And

Chris Needs:

We’ve had the fiscal support to

Noah Brooks:

Sort of handle that. He was making the point that the rise in the unemployment rate wasn’t necessarily a function of layoffs but rather a function of labor supply, which is a good thing, which is a good thing. And four week moving average of new unemployment claims is still under two 50, like 2 45, 2 47. It used to be that anything under 400,000 on the four week was inflationary wage inflationary. And now we’ve been under 400,000 for years. And yeah, we did have some inflation, but it is not picking up to the point where there there’s a bell ringing saying, Hey, there’s a problem.

And it does seem like it’s more of a supply with jobs than layoffs. So I’ll tell you what, we had a great few days here in Nashville, couldn’t be happier and I think the advisors got a lot out of it if you came. Thank you so much. It was great to see all of you. If you didn’t, by all means, look for the next one and we’d love to see you here next year, even though it’s not going to be here, it’ll be somewhere else. Yep. Alright. For the market enthusiast, I’m Noah Brooks and Chris needs, thank you so much for joining us.