Giving your teenager a credit card may seem like a scary proposition, but it could be the safest way to teach them about credit. Credit expert John Ulzheimer says it's just like teaching your teenager how to operate a car, but in a controlled environment. “Nobody would just let a teen hop in a car and drive,” says Ulzheimer, who formerly worked with Equifax and FICO. “And nobody should just let their kid get a card on their own someday without some teaching by the parents.”
We are at our best as educators and space-makers for a deeper engagement with the financial world, and all our work with our clients should spur on hope.
Many people in my profession would not make an immediate leap from the late physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking to our work of capital markets, mutual funds and financial planning. This is understandable. Our work in financial advising is overtly pragmatic. It’s either mathematical or fervently personal, with little room for theory or imagining the “why” behind what we do. It is—I suggest—so much like the world of science Hawking was awakened to 50 or more years ago. He watched as the imaginations of his peers went deeply to the practical, to the technological, while he dreamed of deeper questions about how and why.
...We need them to abandon the machine work that has become such a distraction. Oftentimes, smart advisors use less than superior tools to do their darndest to serve their clients and in the meantime have lost human connection. It is time to alter our expectations of financial advisors. We primarily need to expect them to act in human, not machine ways, and in doing so more than earn their fee. What are the human things great advisors do?
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