The world seems like such a different place now that the COVID numbers have decreased. We are thankful and excited to be inching back to some semblance of normalcy.

There are a few big announcements and we want to catch you up on current operations.

Welcome Camrie Wagner! Camrie just graduated from Kansas State University with a degree in personal financial planning. We hired her in November and are excited about her arrival.

Her first day is Monday, June 14. We’ll get her up to speed and interacting with all our clients very soon. You’ll be won over quickly by her delightful personality!

Joey and Carolyn were invited to speak at FPA NorCal – one of the top financial planning conferences in the country. Our topic was titled “Transferring Trust to the Next Generation of Financial Planners”. We discussed our true ensemble model and how we get young planners up to speed so they can share the joy of interacting with clients very early in their career. The audience loved the talk.

Too many firms have a “Grand Poohbah” model where one planner runs the show. This creates too much dependence on one person and meanwhile, fantastic younger planners languish in the background supporting older advisors. Both the clients and the firm are up a creek if an event knocks the older planner out of the picture.

As you know, with our team approach, we cross train so we can all manage your financial planning and investment management. Joey has become a star at insurance planning and projection planning. As a CFA, Tim focuses only on investments, and Carolyn knows how to handle investment management if Tim is out of pocket. Carolyn manages estate and tax planning, and Joey is learning more about this over time. Camrie will be integrated quickly into the basics of each of these areas, with the goal for her to become an expert in one or two of the subjects. This model is rare in financial services and we love sharing our approach.

Along with doing a great job for our clients, our passion is to make the financial planning profession better and better. We are grateful we have innovative methods to share with others.

Now that COVID is under control and we are vaccinated, we are back to working in the office with some minor changes. We learned from the pandemic that some remote work is beneficial, so everyone will work from home two days a week and two to three of us will be staffing the office daily.

For client meetings scheduled in advance, we will all be present in the office. If you request a last-minute meeting, we may not have everyone present, but we’ll do our best to make it happen. We look forward to seeing you in person again and are excited for you to meet Camrie!

People periodically ask when we plan to take new clients. For now we do not plan to start adding new clients. We’ll revisit this decision once Camrie is integrated and everyone is feeling good about our service and work life balance.

We are so grateful that each of you choose to be a part of Life Planning Partners, Inc. As always, please let us know how we are doing and what we could be doing better.