Ski Lessons and the Value of Financial Expertise | Josh McAlister
Over the holidays, I went skiing for the first time. I had been snowboarding a handful of days previously, with many painful bruises to show for it, but never skiing. When my family decided they wanted to hit the mountain, I thought to myself, “might as well try skiing as I couldn’t be any worse than I am as a snowboarder.”
The ski lodge was running an incredible deal – $70 for the lift ticket, ski rentals, and a private 1 ½ hour lesson. My brother-in-law, who is an avid and excellent skier, kept saying, “you just can’t beat that.”
My one problem – the lesson. I did not want to take it, for a plethora of reasons including:
What if my instructor is subpar?
What if 1 ½ hours is not enough to really make a difference?
I am only getting on the mountain once a season (if that), why not just try to get down the mountain as quickly as possible?
Will the instructor make me feel stupid?
What will my family think of me doing the lessons?
How will I look to others if I am taking a lesson? Will they view me as inadequate?
(In case you did not pick up on how obviously ridiculous this question is, these are people I do not even know!!!)
It seemed like the course of least resistance would be to not do the lesson, fall down the mountain with my family, look somewhat a fool, and then make a few jokes about how bad I was on the drive home so we could have a good laugh. After all, would it even be worth learning how to properly ski?
Of course we all know that the lesson would be the correct path for me to choose – but I ask you to reflect on a memory of your life where you were in a similar situation. I would argue that the same rhetoric of questions raced through your head.
Unfortunately – there is a high correlation from me contemplating working with a ski instructor to how we view of partnering with a financial advisor. We worry if the advisor is worth the value, if the advisor will look down on the client’s situation with disdain, or what the most important people in the client’s lives will think of the situation. Even worse, we feel as if we do not know how to measure the success of the relationship with the advisor, if working with an advisor will even make a difference, or if we are better off just handling our money ourselves.
All too often, we decide it is easier to fall down rather than ski down the mountain with no plan or direction. In my humble opinion, this is a weak excuse used in order to not disrupt a subpar status quo.
I decided to proceed with the ski lesson, primarily due to the strong influence of my wife (oddly enough, this situation often is the nudge in hiring a financial advisor as well). The instructor’s name was Tucker, and he started off by teaching me how to stop by forming a ‘pizza’ with my skis. Critical step, and easy enough to master. He then taught me the proper way to sit in your skis – shins pressed against the front of your boot, knees bent, rear-end back, chest up, and shoulders relaxed. Seemed enough to master, I played collegiate sports, and this sounded like so many of my coaches saying to get into a good athletic position. This took a matter of 20 minutes on the bunny hill – and questions 2 and 3 above started to dominate my thoughts.
The instructor might have seen a little bit of my confidence (or was it arrogance? Insecurities were coursing through me – confidence and arrogance can be blurred in those situations) and decided to teach me how to parallel turn. For those non-skier readers, this is how skiers go fast and look like they are swooshing and swishing down the mountain. This involves digging sides of the skis into the snow and transferring weight between legs to gracefully slide down the mountain.
I got tripped up here, literally and figuratively, and kept needing a patient guide to help me correct what I did wrong. Parallel turns were easy to perform in theory, but one mistake could cause the skier to catch an edge and wipe out. I wiped out about a dozen times, and at each instance the instructor met me where I was, asked what I felt, and then provided guidance on how best to fix the situation. He kept telling me skiing was like riding a bike – once you get it, it will click. This encouragement I noticed was starting to make a difference in my self-talk.
I finally had a successful parallel turn – and the instructor immediately verbally affirmed what I did. We practiced that successful move over and over for the rest of the lesson. He even took me up on a couple runs on the chairlift and we practiced it further. By now, questions from 2 and 3 from above were no longer a thought. At the end of the day, I was keeping up with my family members, parallel turning, and not wiping out. This was the true value of the instructor.
There are a lot of similarities to how we treat money management – this is in large part to previous negative money experiences with family members, friends, and financial advisors. Simply put – this is unfortunate. Similar to me not knowing how to turn while skiing without proper guidance – how can we expect non-financial experts to know when to tax-loss harvest, what amount of liability insurance coverage is needed, what retirement plan is optimal, what investments make sense, or how can they tax efficiently grow their financial structure? It is almost impossible to execute without a true expert and takes a lifetime to accomplish.
Conclusion:
Partnering with a financial planner is intimidating, time consuming, and frictional. Clients want to be heard, valued, listened to, and provided with expert advice and guidance over their financial lives. My challenge to you is this – partner with a planner who takes your entire financial structure into account. Have the confidence to demand excellence over your own situation and look for an advisor who will educate and empower you to achieve your life’s goals.
