This is Part 2 of our conversation with Frank Gasper. You can read Feature: Part 1 - Family Harmony here.
We talked with Frank Gasper, owner and financial advisor at CSR Wealth Management, with decades of experience helping people. Frank is an enthusiastic early adopter of new technologies, but he also understands how some folks may feel intimidated by those systems.
In our conversation with Frank, he breaks down for us how he helps his clients realize that technological solutions can benefit them the most.
"At the core, when it comes to “the financial services business and working with individual clients, what we're doing is estate planning right from day one. When we take on a client, we talk to them about their education plan for their child, and then, at some point, will be talking about their estate plan and then transitioning those assets to their family,” says Frank.
To him, the beauty of the collaboration is that advisors can set levels of connection with family members and encourage families to have this level of transparency, so that down the line, there aren't problems within family units.
“Another example is a client I recently acquired. The gentleman was a little bit older and had some health concerns, so I contacted him and his son, who was also a client in the book. I went over everything with him - setting up the SideDrawers so that I could gather the information for the father. The son looked after everything and I suggested to him that we start populating his father’s data, tax returns and all his investments and properties, wills, etc.”
“Unfortunately shortly after, the dad went to hospital and was not able to get through the difficult situation. Thankfully the sons had helped gather the wills and POAs earlier and were able to create the trust quickly. But unfortunately he passed, and considering we had a lot of the data already populated, the flow of information helped facilitate things so much through this difficult period for the family.”
And because the process was so smooth, Frank is now working not only with the son, but also their spouse, and planning for them, and he’s also onboarding another son of this client.
This example perfectly illustrates the value that advisors bring to clients. Ultimately, it’s not about the money or even the technology, it’s about getting the client into a better situation.
And with collaboration, advisors can not only help out clients, but also look at the opportunity for extended family and children being able to continue to access the information. Keeping the dialogue open with all the units of the family, and allowing them to keep all the key documents of the various stages of their lives in one place – whether we are talking school records, RESPs, TFSAs, mortgages, birth and death certificates, wills, etc, is so helpful when a major illness or death of a family member occurs. Record keeping is as easy as scanning a document and putting it SideDrawer, where it's going to live securely. It doesn't have to be moved ever again.
According to Frank…
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