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You’ve probably heard the case for hiring a financial advisor. This episode takes a narrower angle: what separates a high-quality advisor from everyone else using the same title, and how a DIY investor can spot the difference before it shows up in a mistake.
I’m joined by Ranie Verby, CPA, CFP®, Plancorp’s Director of Practice Management. She leads advisor development across the firm, which means coaching advisors, tightening the processes clients actually feel, and building a career model that keeps good advisors in the business long enough to serve families through the hardest seasons.
Here are the notes from our conversation…
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How to Choose a High-Quality Financial Advisor: Fiduciary Duty and RIA Screening (01:30)
“Financial advisor” can mean almost anything. On the golf course it might mean an insurance salesperson. It might mean a broker-dealer. It might mean someone who is compensated in ways that create incentives you never see directly.
Ranie’s quickest screen is the business model. Start with a registered investment advisor. Then listen for transparency early. A high-quality advisor can explain how the firm works, how the firm gets paid, and what fiduciary responsibility means in practice. If they take that standard seriously, they bring it up without acting like it’s fine print.
Ranie also mentions a firm-level signal that requires real compliance work: Plancorp’s Center for Fiduciary Excellence certification. It takes due diligence to earn, and it signals a willingness to operate under scrutiny.
Her most memorable filter is simpler: who pays them? In the model she prefers, only clients pay the advisor. If commissions and incentives are in the picture, you’re paying for them somewhere, even if it’s buried in higher costs. Ranie jokes that those incentives fund some really nice trips.
Signs of a Great Advisor: Trust, Continuity, and Why a Team Matters (04:51)
Ranie says the best part of her job is seeing advisors with clients. The value shows up in trust, and that kind of trust builds over years.
She shares a story about a long-tenured advisor working with a widow. Their relationship was shaped by the death of her husband and the months afterward when she wasn’t ready to make decisions. He stayed present through that period, guided her through it, and helped her move at a pace she could handle. The bond was clear because it had been earned over a decade.
I add a signal I notice when new clients are introduced to Plancorp. Our advisors ask great questions. Prospects often ask me how the first meeting works, and I tell them I can’t predict what your advisor will ask. That’s part of what quality looks like in real time.
Ranie ties this to why Plancorp tries to be a destination for the nation’s best advisors. A solo advisor has to run a business. Payroll, compliance, back office, operations. Client work competes with business work, and it often squeezes out continuity. It also creates a succession problem. Vacations become harder. Support gets thinner.
A team-based model gives clients stability. It also lets advisors be advisors. Specialists handle payroll, compliance, and back-office work. Advisors can take vacation. Clients know they have a full team. The relationship doesn’t hang on one person doing everything.
Behavioral Finance in Financial Planning: Tough Conversations, Estate Planning, and Family Decisions (08:26)
Ranie’s path through the industry shaped how she thinks about this work. She started in public accounting, liked the structure, and also saw how easy it is for people doing the work to feel unseen. When she moved into financial planning, she loved being close to clients, hearing them, and paying attention to what they need. Later, when she moved into management, she saw the same issue on the advisor side.
Her line is the cleanest summary: therapists go to therapy, doctors see a doctor, chiropractors see a chiropractor. Helpers need help. Advisors need rest, focus, and development. They need people investing in them as human beings so they can show up well for clients.
That connects to behavioral finance in a practical way. Ranie pushes back on the language people use. Investor behavior often gets labeled “irrational.” She sees it as normal. Fear responses make sense given how brains work.
She flips the script on what’s irrational. Asking someone to rebalance in a down market while they’re stressed and afraid is the irrational part. What feels rational to the client is getting away from the fear. The advisor’s job is to supply calm logic when emotions are loud.
This is where she broadens the definition of great advice. A high-quality advisor is not only looking at investments. They look at tax planning and estate planning. She puts extra emphasis on the years before the estate plan is triggered. Retirement turns into medical care. Family steps in. Powers of attorney matter. Legal documents stop being abstract and start being the difference between a smooth transition and a crisis. She also talks about the advisor’s role as the conduit for how you want things to go, before and after death.
Behavioral finance training gives advisors reps for those moments. The work is not hard technically. It’s hard emotionally. The profession is trending younger, and many advisors haven’t lived through these situations yet. Training and story sharing help them stay present in the conversations clients most want to avoid.
DIY Investing vs Hiring an Advisor: Accountability, Decision Support, and Owned Outcomes (13:44)
A lot of listeners are DIY investors. Some will hire an advisor eventually, and some won’t. The gap shows up when a decision has to be made under stress, with limited information, and the emotional weight is real.
I share a story I come back to often. I hired someone to mow my lawn when my first kid was born in 2013. It started at $35 a week and crept up over time. There’s no chance I’m telling you what I pay now because it’s embarrassing. Then a tree fell on our fence, and they fixed it. I didn’t ask. I didn’t even know they had done it.
That’s when I realized I wasn’t paying for grass. I was paying for owned outcomes. Responsiveness. Accountability. A team that knows me when I email.
Ranie adds the DIY point in a way that lands. People can’t be experts at everything. You might be great at investing. That’s real. Do you know every estate planning nuance that prevents a tax situation or averts a family crisis? She gives a concrete example: people assume the medical power of attorney and the financial power of attorney will get along and make decisions together. Sometimes they don’t. Those blind spots are hard to see until you’re already in the situation.
Her view of an advisor’s role is speed and education in decision-making. You move faster with better information and less guesswork. You don’t have to spend months doing research to discover what you don’t know.
She also makes a blunt point about pricing. If you’re shopping for the cheapest solution, the firm probably isn’t investing in talent. That shows up later when you want accountability and follow-through.
How Plancorp Uses AI in Financial Planning to Save Advisor Time and Improve Meetings (16:29)
We shift from the human side of advice to AI, and Ranie frames it around how advisors spend their days. She asks advisors in the field a simple question: how do you spend your day? A common answer is email-driven reaction. That’s a rough way to serve clients.
Plancorp has tried to build structured processes so advisors can stay proactive. A big part of that is reducing what Ranie calls the late-night tax. Manually scraping calendars and files. Taking notes in meetings. Recapping meetings afterward. Writing history notes. Sending scheduling links weeks in advance and following up. It adds up, and it steals energy.
AI helps remove some of that burden. Ranie points to a higher-value use case than basic note-taking: going back through prior meeting notes and synthesizing an agenda for the next meeting. That saves hours and also helps newer planners operate with more context.
I share a story that made the value obvious to me. A new advisor joined an account and read through years of notes, something like 20 years’ worth. They found a detail the client had forgotten, brought it back into the conversation, and the client was thrilled. That kind of work is hard to do when the archive is massive and time is limited. Tools that help surface the signal make advisors better.
Ranie also points out the meeting-room benefit. When advisors aren’t buried in documentation, they have more bandwidth to notice the human stuff. She gives an example: an advisor loves talking about taxes, and a client hates it. The client disengages, and the advisor keeps pointing at the board anyway. Better tools don’t replace judgment, but they give advisors room to use it.
Advisor Burnout and Capacity: Why it Affects Client Experience and Continuity (21:49)
I raise a concern about what happens when technology creates capacity. Plenty of big organizations use that capacity to squeeze more productivity out of people.
Ranie says Plancorp has been explicit about a different goal. Burnout is real, and it spiked in 2020 and 2021. Advisors are skewing younger, and many haven’t lived through the same market pressure. Paying attention to burnout is part of protecting the client experience.
Her phrase is simple: capacity comes first. The point is not to push advisors toward more and more meetings. The point is to keep enough room in the day for real relationships.
She repeats a line she uses often: don’t bring your whole self to work. Bring your best self to work. She talks about the rooms in your identity house. An advisor is not only an advisor. People have families, hobbies, interests, and those parts of life affect how much energy they have to show up for clients.
She shares an example from a speaker on gratitude journaling. Several advisors told her it changed what they did first thing in the morning. They stopped checking Outlook the moment they shut off the alarm. They put the phone down and thought of three things they were thankful for. The change was small and the effect was big.
She also shares a cultural proof point: leaders decided years ago not to send messages outside business hours, and they’ve stuck with it. That signals what the firm values.
Ranie closes with a line that ties directly to clients. Some firms will use AI efficiency to push advisors toward 300 clients. Humans can’t sustain 300 relationships at depth. The goal at Plancorp is fewer relationships, deeper relationships, and advisors with enough capacity to go there.
Financial Advisor Red Flags and Green Flags: Team Size, Succession Plan, and Relationship Fit (26:23)
Ranie gives a clear framework for evaluating an existing advisor. Start with the team. If an advisor has 300 clients and it’s just that advisor, maybe with one assistant, that structure is built to maximize income and minimize expenses. She calls it out directly as inconsistent with fiduciary duty to the client.
She also throws in a detail that’s easy to picture. If they’re still handing you a paper book, that’s a problem.
Look for investment in a real team. An assistant. A receptionist. Young planners learning from someone with wisdom. More than one person who knows your story. Then ask the succession question: where is the plan, and what happens to you when your advisor is gone?
If you’re interviewing a firm, she warns that the first meeting is often with the rainmaker. The rainmaker might not be your day-to-day person. The question to answer is simple: are you going to serve me day to day? At Plancorp, the answer is often no, and the firm says so. The day-to-day advisor is in the room.
Then she shifts to fit. Do you want to spend time with this person? Does your spouse or partner want to spend time with this person? If you dread the meeting, you delay the meeting. If the advisor talks down to you or talks down to your partner, you avoid them. That’s where her dentist test comes in. If the appointment feels like the dentist, keep looking.
Integrated Financial Planning Under One Roof: Investing, Taxes, and Estate Coordination (29:08)
I add a point about smaller firms where everyone is serving clients. Somebody still has to do due diligence. Somebody has to read tax law changes. Somebody has to stay current on estate planning nuance. If everyone is in meetings all day, that work tends to get thin.
This is where I talk about commoditized investing versus tailoring. Low-cost, diversified investing can be commoditized. Many households still need customization. The suit analogy lands here. Off the rack works for some people, and many people still need tailoring.
Ranie’s medical analogy makes the integration point clear. She tells a story about taking her daughter to an ENT. She asked about tonsils and also asked about lungs because she was worried about asthma. The ENT’s response was blunt. His job stops at the throat. The lungs are below that line.
Her point is not that specialization is bad. Her point is that a client doesn’t want to go to one building for investments, another for tax, another for estate planning. A collaborative advisory firm brings specialties together under one umbrella and helps the client understand how the whole system works, because it’s
For Advisors: How to Evaluate Your Firm and Build a Sustainable Advisory Career (32:22)
We close with a short segment for advisors who listen. Ranie starts with culture fit. Some people thrive in a two- or three-person shop, and that model makes sense for them. Running a business and making money is allowed. It’s kind of the point.
She describes the advisors who often fit well at Plancorp. Entrepreneurs and rainmakers who bet on themselves in a solo practice, then realize they got into the business to serve clients and now client service is 50% of their time. Payroll and compliance fill the rest. Those advisors walk into a firm with support and feel relief.
She also describes the emotion behind the solo rainmaker model. Those people wake up in the middle of the night thinking about what they missed for an existing client. They fear the revenue that could walk out the door. New clients are easy. Retained clients are hard. Retention requires showing up, doing great work, and beating your best last self every year.
Plancorp’s structure is built so advisors don’t have to be the estate tax person, the income tax person, and the insurance person. They can pull expertise from the team and keep the relationship strong.
Choosing a Financial Advisor: Fiduciary in Writing and Meet the Full Team (36:20)
Ranie ends with two rules. The fiduciary commitment belongs in writing, and it should be part of the engagement agreement. You also want to meet the whole team, not only the rainmaker.
Then she gives the broader screen. If there is no clear plan for taxes, estate planning, and continuity of advisory services, keep looking. If someone says all the right things and won’t put fiduciary commitment in writing, walk away. There are more advisors.
Resources:
- Check out Ranie’s blog: Girl Meets Money
- Connect with Ranie on LinkedIn
- Learn more about Ranie
- EP 185: Retirement Planning: Should You Go It Alone or Hire An Advisor?
The Long Term Investor audio is edited by the team at The Podcast Consultant
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Disclosure: This content, which contains security-related opinions and/or information, is provided for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon in any manner as professional advice, or an endorsement of any practices, products or services. There can be no guarantees or assurances that the views expressed here will be applicable for any particular facts or circumstances, and should not be relied upon in any manner. You should consult your own advisers as to legal, business, tax, and other related matters concerning any investment.
The commentary in this “post” (including any related blog, podcasts, videos, and social media) reflects the personal opinions, viewpoints, and analyses of the Plancorp LLC employees providing such comments, and should not be regarded the views of Plancorp LLC. or its respective affiliates or as a description of advisory services provided by Plancorp LLC or performance returns of any Plancorp LLC client.
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