Independent Advisors Should Try Harder To Recruit, Train Young Talent

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.

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The Social Security Administration’s 2018 Trustee report contains the same dire news as last year – the benefit program will run out of money in 2034. Some look at this distant date as a reason to remain calm, confident a solution will be found. “Despite the projections on the insolvency of Social Security, I do not hold the belief that Social Security will dry up entirely,” says Ryan Repko, a financial adviser for Ruedi Wealth Management, Inc. in Champaign, Illinois. “For better or worse, social security has become hardcoded in the American DNA, after all, it is not called the ‘3^rd rail of politics’ for nothing. No politician wants to be in office and have social security dry up, so something will have to change that will reform social security, to keep it intact for generations to come. That’s my humble optimistic view.”

Others deny the way the math is interpreted. “Social Security is definitively not on the cusp of insolvency,” says Glenn Sulzer, Senior Analyst in the Corporate Compliance division of Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory U.S. “The media hysteria that typically accompanies the SS Trustees’ Report ignores the fact that under current tax collections, the trust fund will be sufficient to pay 3/4 benefits for 75 years. The choreographed emergency is especially misplaced with those currently 50 and older, and even with respect to employees under the age of 50.

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