Lesson 6 | Goal Achievement™ (4:49 minutes)

Goal Achievement™

Now that you've entered in the goals into the application ... and hopefully you've moved on to printing off the Affirmation Report and emailing that off to your client for sign-off. Once you have got an affirmation back from the client that these are their prioritized goals, and ... now, you go into the Goal Clarity and Goal Achievement section and finish off the qualitative aspect of planning. So going into this section here, you have each one of the goals, and you click View. And you can see the information you've entered in so far, and then you click Edit.

And going down to this, you can see where you're going to enter in the planning gap and their action steps. Under planning gap, you're going to be entering in the information of where the client is today and where they need to be. So if a client has $500,000 saved and needs $750,000 for financial independence for retirement, their gap is that they have a $250,000 shortfall. That's the details you're putting in here, and we separate that out from the action steps because the planning gap is the lifeblood. When a client really wants to close that gap, then we have many, many different possibilities, or maybe only one action steps for them to follow.

So then, we can really delineate between, "Does the client not understand or want us to walk them through certain action steps because they don't want to follow those?" Or maybe it's because that gap is not really something they want to close. Most advisors historically will just create a paragraph form, an executive summary around gaps and recommendations. We purposely separate them so that we can fully get affirmation that the client wants to close this gap, and that's the gap. And then, we can step into saying, "You need to save $10,000 a month into a certain asset allocation to meet the $750,000 retirement goal, which will close that $250,000 gap."

So for every single goal, you're going to enter in a planning gap where you type in the actual planning gap here, and under the Place of Most Potential, the action steps. They need to buy permanent insurance. They need to put in a will, and you're going to be specific about it. For wills, many times, the planning gap is that the will is outdated or the client does not have a will. Recommendation is to create the process and setting up the steps to meet with an attorney to complete a will in the next three months. So we have the gap that they don't have a will or it's outdated. Recommendation is to set up a meeting, work through with an attorney, and get a will in place that matches their dreams that they want for themselves and for their family and possibly the next generation.A little bit further down here, if you feel that there's a strategy that needs to be highlighted, you can put in ... we have many, many sample strategies in here around education trusts and so many different strategies if you feel like you need to highlight a CRT, or whatever that may be. So you can type those in there. Most cases, the strategies will be in the action steps so that you don't need to highlight them separately, but if you want to highlight a specific strategy, you may do that. And down at the bottom here, you have active or closed. And when a goal is completed or has been decided not to be prioritized, you can close those goals, and it will take it out of the plan. Most cases, you're going to be active until they're completed. We click Save.

And then, now, we have entered the information in there for Goal Achievement. And then, you're going to go to the Reports section, and just as a reminder, for every client case, you should run a Goal Clarity report that lists the goals and a Goal Achievement report that specifically will list each goal and their gap and the recommendation by itself. So I will download the Goal Achievement report, and you'll see where there's data entered into the application for ... here is this specific financial independence goal, the planning gap, and action steps. And you're going to do that for every single goal, so every client should really get a list of their goals and then a list of the gap and the recommendation.