Happy New Year to you and your families! I hope you are off to a great start as I believe 2022 will be a great year but also an interesting and challenging one too, but aren’t they all!
Most likely, you have finished your required annual reviews with your clients and your financial plans are in place. Clients now look to 2022 with a new road map to help them achieve their goals and objectives. Annual reviews are so important not just for the strategies you lay out but the accountability piece as well.
My guess is that you take a look at the client’s mortgage and determine if the rate they are in is competitive and there is nothing wrong with this. I do the same but then I go a little deeper.
When I do a complete Mortgage Fitness Check Up (MFCU) I like to ask a couple of questions around their overall financial plan and see if their current mortgage strategy is in alignment with their larger financial plan.
Are you thinking, “what is a mortgage strategy”? If you are, that is a great question. Let me give you a quick example of this. Client is behind on their retirement savings and investment plan. They have a lot of equity and their mortgage is below 3%. Solid wage earner who lives within their means. So some good news here but the lack of retirement savings is a HUGE concern.
I then take a look at cash flow and any non tax preferred debt and see if we can carve out monthly savings to give them room to increase their retirement investing. Let’s say the client is currently paying $2k in mortgage payments and has $400 in other debts.
We refinance at a similar rate and eliminate the debt and create another 30 year mortgage and keep their mortgage payment at $2k. Now the client can add $400 to their retirement savings each month without affecting the household cash flow. They don’t even feel it and it get’s them back in alignment with their retirement goal.
This is a very simple example of a MFCU but also a very common one that I work on. These questions and strategies are why I wrote a book on this whole topic specifically for Advisors. You can download it for FREE at WWW.SANDIGEOLENDING.US/ADVISORBOOK.
Let’s schedule a 15 minute Zoom call to discuss how Effectively Managing the Third Side of the Balance Sheet can lead to Protecting and Growing the Assets for your clients.
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