Birmingham, Alabama-based financial guru Jeff Roberts, who was recently named one of the top private wealth advisors in the nation by Barron’s®, came on Yellowhammer Radio to lay out the facts so people can decide for themselves.
The full conversation with Mr. Roberts can be heard on the Yellowhammer Radio podcast or in the video above, and a lightly edited transcript of his interview with Yellowhammer’s Andrea Tice and Scott Chambers can be read below.
Subscribe to the Yellowhammer Radio Podcast on iTunes. Learn more about Jeff Roberts’ private wealth advisory practice at JeffRobertsAndAssociates.com.
Andrea Tice:
Hey, welcome back in to Yellow Hammer Radio on Superstation 101.1 WYDE. Andrea Tice here, and we are about to talk to Jeff Roberts. He’s on the air with us today. He’s our local financial guru and the founder of Jeff Roberts and Associates and we’re excited to share today that Jeff was once again named one of Barron’s top 1200 advisors for 2017, which is very exciting news. We knew that he was under consideration a couple weeks ago when he called, and now the word is out. This is an honor awarded to a very select group of advisors for quality of service and success in both business and ethics, which is important.
Not only was Jeff named the top 1200 in the nation, but he’s number three in the state of Alabama, so this is really an incredible honor for Jeff and we offer him congratulations and we are going to bring him online right now.
Jeff, this is like the sixth or seventh time that you’ve received this honor?
Jeff Roberts:
I think it’s actually seventh, my staff tells me, which I have to be fair and say that anyone that is fortunate enough to be listed in Barron’s can never do something like that alone. I have got the most amazing team of people that support me. These advisers and staff are just incredible, they’re absolutely incredible. Of course, we have amazing clients, and you have to have both those ingredients in order to be able to achieve something like this. We’re just thankful for my team and my clients.
Andrea Tice:
It is a great honor, especially to do it seven times. Back to back, consecutive almost?
Jeff Roberts:
Yeah, there was about a two-year stint where I think we fell off their radar screen, but …
Andrea Tice:
Now you’re back in action.
Jeff Roberts:
We’ve been back on it for the last several years. It’s been really neat to have the national recognition and for our team to be able to see that the good work that we do is recognized that way. It’s been exciting.
Andrea Tice:
Yeah. Last week we talked about couples and managing their finances in order to have a happy marriage, which I think was just flat out very practical. It’s a common, everyday occurrence for every couple out there, so you offered some great advice on that on how to be transparent and to discuss larger purchases and then share the responsibility and all of that. That was really good. What have you got for us today, Jeff?
Jeff Roberts:
Today’s going to be helpful … If anyone who’s listening has access to a computer, pull up a browser because we may be going to an online site. Today we’re going to talk about retirement planning, and whether you’re currently retired or trying to get there, when it comes to retirement, we know that there’s one thing that everybody wants. You’re likely to say, “Well, a huge bucket of money, right Jeff?” That would be great, but really the one thing that everyone wants when it comes to retirement is the word confidence. People want to be confident that they can maintain their choice of financial lifestyle and preserve their next egg throughout a retirement that may be longer than expected. They want to be confident that they won’t run out of money. They want to be confident that they haven’t left out or forgotten a key planning consideration that could hurt them down the road.
Confidence is one of the biggest, bottom line, peel away the onion, and that’s one of the core pieces that most people want when they’re either in or approaching retirement.
Andrea Tice:
That’s good to identify that core element, that core emotion, if you will or desire, because you’re going to tackle it different ways for different people, right?
Jeff Roberts:
It’s true. Our company, the company that I franchise through, Ameriprise Financial Services, Inc., Ameriprise has been helping clients to plan their finances for over 120 years, I mean since 1894, so we know retirement planning, and that’s that why we developed our exclusive Confident Retirement Approach, which makes retirement planning more manageable by breaking it down into small steps. It’s a conversation. The Confident Retirement Approach is a conversation, it’s a process for mapping out the components of successful retirement, which we believe there’s four.
Andrea Tice:
Okay. I’d love to hear them.
Jeff Roberts:
The first, and I thought what we may do … Well, here are the four. There’s covering essential expenses in retirement, then ensuring lifestyle expenses, then preparing for the unexpected, and then leaving a legacy. Those four essential components, if you just tackle each of those perfectly then you’re going to have the complete ingredients. Now we’re going to actually tackle each of those four areas, we’re going to do that in detail in the next couple radio segments that I do over the next couple weeks, so tune in because I think that’ll be a great learning opportunity as we discuss the Ameriprise Confident Retirement Approach, but really what I want to do today, I want to dig into this a little bit more specifically. I want to give everybody an online planning tool that they can use today, literally right now.
Andrea Tice:
Okay.
Jeff Roberts:
It’s called the 3-Minute Confident Retirement Check, and if you’re on a computer and have a browser pulled open you can literally go to JeffRobertsandAssociates.com. If you just literally pull that up, and you can do it now or at any time. If you pull that up and you get to that website, that’s where you can find the 3-Minute Confident Retirement Check.
Basically, people naturally have questions about retirement. Everyone has them. Our 3-Minute Confident Retirement Check can help you to start finding the answers and this is a tool that is designed to help gauge your retirement readiness and see where you currently stand. In just three minutes you’ll literally navigate through 16 simple and yet thoughtful questions. As you answer these questions, there’ll be little triangles that begin to populate, and based on how confident you are, you’ll be given a personal picture of your retirement confidence, and you get to see where you stand relative to other people that are the United States average as well as the average client, for example at Ameriprise, where we work with clients who have actually been through the Confident Retirement approach.
You’re even then given suggestive conversation starters or questions based on your unique responses. It’s a great, simple, online tool and if you literally just pulled up JeffRobertandAssociates, within a couple seconds you’ll see my face.
Andrea Tice:
I did.
Jeff Roberts:
If you can ignore that image, scroll right below it and you’ll see literally a link that says 3-Minute Confident Retirement Check.
Andrea Tice:
Yes, I see the image Jeff, and it looks just fine. It’s very well color coordinated, so I don’t know what you’re problem is, and then you also have the really clear pyramid that you just talked about, the four key elements that you were mentioning.
Jeff Roberts:
That’s exactly. That lists the four components that are kind of listed in a triangular format, and we’ll walk through this again next week because I want to explain what each of those means, the covering essentials, ensuring lifestyle, preparing for the unexpected, leaving a legacy. We’ll walk through those. Then the 3-Minute Retirement Check basically asks you 16 questions that are geared toward each of those four elements of the Confident Retirement Approach. You’ll get questions like: have you estimated annual expenses in retirement?
Andrea Tice:
Okay.
Jeff Roberts:
Do you have a written plan? Have you factored inflation into your future projections? It’s simple stuff that you’ll just, yes, no, yes, no.
Andrea Tice:
Okay.
Jeff Roberts:
It’ll talk about things like how will you spend your time in retirement? Whether it’s volunteering, being with family and friends, traveling, exercising, caring for loved ones, whatever. Then there will be questions about what type of liquidity you have outside your retirement nest egg or how confident you may be in unexpected expenses in the future. You’ll walk through those simple questions and then the result that everybody can see is, it’s going to literally give you a picture of your readiness, and you can, it’ll have literally like a triangle that lists the fundamental components of the retirement approach and you can click on the different triangles and it’ll give you feedback based on what you selected and comparing you to the US population as well as other clients at Ameriprise. Powerful, powerful tool.
Andrea Tice:
It really is, and people can do it in the privacy of their own home and if they, rather than necessarily come face-to-face with someone at this point …
Jeff Roberts:
Correct.
Andrea Tice:
They can do this and then they can come in with more of an assessment of where they are and have then somewhat embraced the reality of where they are when they come to you.
Jeff Roberts:
Yeah, and that’s a great point. It goes in a couple direction but it leads to getting help for someone. Hopefully the idea is when people get through it they see that, “You know, there’s some gaps or some questions that I’ve got, and when you’re done you literally have a place at the end whey you can download your answers and the entire portfolio so to speak. It’s not really a portfolio per se, but I should say the information.
Andrea Tice:
Right.
Jeff Roberts:
You’ll download that in a PDF, which you can save for yourself and print it out and then in addition you have an option that says, “Mail this to my adviser,” or “Send this to my adviser.” I encourage people, if you click that it would send me literally a snapshot of what you’re seeing, and you can put an email address in there. It could basically be the type of thing where if you want we would simply send you a note that says, “IF you have any questions, let us know.”
Now let me make sure you understand something clearly, because a lot of people think, “Ah, here’s the catch.” If I fill this out they’re going to have my information, they’re going to harass me. Absolutely not. The last thing in the world I’m going to do is harass people about doing financial planning that are not ready or not there, but if this is something where you’re saying, “Yeah, I’d like just to get in the eyes of somebody that does this for a living and maybe ask a question or two, it can be just an email response where we say, “How can we help? If you have any questions, let us know.”
Andrea Tice:
That’s great.
Jeff Roberts:
We encourage people to walk through this 3-Minute Confident Retirement Retirement Check. It’s a great way to begin assessing their own readiness.
Andrea Tice:
Then if they want to actually call and talk to a person on the other end of the line, where would they do that? How would they do that to get a hold of you, Jeff Roberts and Associates?
Jeff Roberts:
Just give us a buzz at 205-313-9150. Happy to help.
Andrea Tice:
All right. Great to have you on. Look forward to hearing more about Confident Retirement, and we appreciate you sharing already today, Jeff. We’ll talk to you later.
Jeff Roberts:
Absolutely. See you, Andrea.
Andrea Tice:
Okay.
Jeff Roberts:
Bye bye.
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