5 Crucial Questions to Ask Before Paying for Your Child’s College Education

Written by: Matthew Phillips | The last words of the email stood out the most. “… the thing is … we are deaf.” This is how the prospective client closed her message to me in 2017.

When I agreed to meet with the woman and her husband, I was feeling uncertain about how to best communicate with them. To prepare, I added captions to my usual video presentation. But halfway through, I realized the couple was completely overwhelmed with the financial vocabulary I was using, which was entirely new to them. Improvising, I pulled up a blank Word document and started typing which allowed us to converse back and forth. I felt completely inadequate and regretted not preparing more, but did my best to connect with the couple.

To my surprise, the meeting concluded with the wife rejecting my handshake and instead grabbing onto me tightly as she began to cry. “Matthew, thank you for what you have done,” she said. “We have sat with five advisors, and none have come close to helping us like you have. I know we have missed out on financial opportunities because we are deaf.”

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I’ve sat in those rooms, and you have too. You know the ones, where some war-weary veteran of the good old days of financial services talks about how they used to walk uphill both ways in a blizzard to every client meeting.

How the account application was as small as a postcard. How they didn’t even have calculators and surmised rates of return on the back of a napkin.

We are all told that a return to such days would be a good thing for clients and advisors alike and that all of this technology “stuff” is simply ruining a business that at its core is about helping people save for their future, not do calculus.

But those are not the only rooms.

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