The May calendar includes IEEE Global Engineering Day, which is “about recognizing the achievements of engineers and their work that has an impact on society” (https://nationaltoday.com/ieee-global-engineering-day). In honor of this mission, two of Piton’s wealth advisors took time to talk about how engineers and engineering have influenced their work.
Piton Wealth Advisors started leaning toward overlap between its work and engineering a few years ago. Nick Mercer, CFP®, Wealth Advisor II, at the Piton office in Kennewick, WA, says, “I was meeting a lot with clients who are engineers by profession and I realized there was a shared vision and language in what we did. I could never do what those engineers do professionally, but I felt we could deepen our service to clients by using engineering to see ‘behind the scenes’ the work that goes into financial planning. I made presentations about it. Started giving, and it’s been great.”
Aaron Ells, CFP®, CDFA®, Wealth Advisor II, at the Piton office in Kalispell, MT, has also given the presentation and found it beneficial, but with some local Montana flavor, “A lot of my clients do it themselves, so even if they’re not career engineers, they’re very familiar with taking on projects and solving problems this way. Building a bridge to last makes perfect sense to them.”
Aaron is referring to the way he began his Engineering a Retirement Plan presentation with the example of the 1940 Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse. Nick explains, “This is an outstanding event in the history of engineering. However, the purpose of the presentation is not to scare people. The lesson is that engineers learned how to create a more robust plan for the bridge, and the replacement bridge is still in use today.” Aaron agrees: “No one builds a bridge and walks on it until it collapses. You maintain and update it, so that it lasts as long as possible. That’s our process for financial plans. We design the plan to be as strong as possible, and then we update it so that it can support our clients as well and for as long as possible.”
That perspective gives rise to another similarity with engineering: multidimensional analysis. Nick Mercer explains, “It’s easy to find retirement ‘calculators’ that will tell you whether you can retire or how likely it is that you can retire. To an engineer, it’s single dimensional analysis: you have a certain amount of money and then use that to determine the probability of retirement. We don’t do that. We believe in multi-dimensional analysis. We don’t recommend a financial plan and say it has a certain probability of failure. No one wants a plan that fails! We offer and suggest that there is a definite possibility that you will have to change the plan in some way. We can then work with clients to understand whatever level of risk they are comfortable with and move forward with what you can think of as ongoing maintenance of the plan.
“The last of the four stages of our planning process, The Navigated Journey, is what we call the ‘Achieve’ stage,” Aaron concluded. “This is what we want to make a maintenance phase. As life changes happen, or there are tax changes in the tax code, whatever, there will be updates. However, our focus remains the same: We want clients to achieve their life goals, with confidence that they can cross the bridges to get them there.”
For an example of a retirement plan engineering presentation, visit https://pitonwealth.com/investment-resources/videos And also keep track of personal events.
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