Millennials. 100% of us want to grow our money. 71% of us have asked family members for advice when it comes to finances. 45% turned to friends. Only 29% of us have turned to professional advice. That number may be low, but it’s okay since financial advisers don’t want us either.
Bloomberg Business recently came out with an interesting article entitled Financial Advisers Don’t Care About Millennials, and the Feeling Is Mutual about how financial advisers do not want millennials as clients. That’s right, only 30% of financial advisers are even looking for clients under the age of 40. Forty! Fellow millennials, we have a long way to go until that age.
But do you know what? Maybe we don’t want financial advisers anyway. For those of us under 35 years old, our medium net worth is only $10,000. It’s pretty dumb to spend $300 an hour on a financial adviser to manage this low amount. If only there was another way to have help growing our money, without spending all the money…
And that’s where technology comes in folks. What better way to target millennials than through technology?! Vanguard has recently cut its minimum in half from clients with $100,000 to clients with $50,000. Still a little too rich for my bones, but hey it’s definitely a start! Vanguard is being closely followed by several new online investment advisers, all changing the investment game, and all charging much less that in person financial advisers.
There you go fellow millennials, we are once again changing the landscape. Financial advisers went from not wanting us (and okay, many of them still don’t) to their companies tailoring their outreach towards us through online outreach and reduced rates. Now this raises the question, can we change the landscape even further?
One day, us millennials will (hopefully) be their target clients. We’ll be older, have the desired amount of money wanted in a client, and have financial advisers reaching out to us instead of vice versa. We are a determined group of young adults who plan on making this a reality. Financial advisers should know this, and take advantage of it. They should form a relationship with us from now. Yes, we may only have $10,000 to our name but think about it, if we have that amount now, how much will we have thirty years from now when we’re the target age? Financial advisers should start to cultivate us from an early age. Help us grow our money, and help grow our trust in both the adviser and firm. This way, when we do become older with more money to our name, we won’t feel a need to seek a new financial adviser. We’ll know who we trust, and who has helped us when others wouldn’t.
We’ve just started to change the landscape in the world of financial advisers. Let’s continue this change until we’re fully reached. We need help investing our money. We need help growing our money. There’s people out there that can help us. It’s time for us to get their attention, and show them that they need us as much as we need them.
