Written by: United Capital In our industry, many advisers assume their job is just to manage people’s money and provide advice about goals that are neatly summed up in the traditional financial planning methodology, like education funding or retirement.By having a set view of how people’s lives should proceed through stages, they end up giving advice that’s based on a standardized model and routine analysis: 
Guess what: this approach isn’t working. If it did, more people would be well prepared for their futures, and adviser satisfaction would be through the roof. Well, neither of those are true based on statistics on retirement readiness, or surveys about satisfaction with the financial industry. So we set out to understand how people really think and feel, so we could invent a better way to help them. Our study of affluent individuals and families, conducted by Barnaby Riedel, PhD and co-founder of Reidel Strategy, painted a very different picture of people’s financial lives.Our survey participants were asked to tell us their financial life story in chapters with highs and lows, just like a book about themselves. Turning points typically mark the transition of one chapter to another, and what we learned was that 83% of all turning points involved a trade-off decision . For the most part we’re all making choices every day that can have a huge impact on our lives. A good trade-off can create a “high” in your story, others are, in retrospect, decisions that trigger a “low”.Here are some examples of important tradeoffs that do have a major financial implication, but they are also choices that touch on values, history and emotions. These are the topics that can cause stress in marriages, or result in sleepless nights:
