Recently I have been writing and focusing on estate planning. My articles on the subject appeared not just on this website but on CPF Board’s IM$avvy and INVEST magazines. I found this topic to be interesting and the market to be completely untapped. So far, I haven’t come across anyone who has done estate planning in accordance to the professional standards. For those who wanted to do estate planning, they are often confused with all the jargons and the parties involved. You need to liaise with the legal people, trust company and financial consultant. But these three parties don’t talk to each other and they don’t know exactly what each other can and cannot do. So the client would end up having to DIY themselves and often just give up thinking that it is just a waste of time.

In a market that is confusing – it means better opportunity for financial practitioners. Traditionally, the financial practitioners in developed countries act as the main coordinator of these specialists. Normally the financial practitioner specializes in one field (say insurance or investment) but is trained and know enough of all other aspect of financial planning namely tax planning and estate planning. You can recognize these professionals by their CFP or ChFC designations. He or she would than coordinate all matters under one roof so that the client is not left to figured out what to do next. However, most financial advisers in Singapore are not even competent to give insurance or investment advice and naturally will not be able to be a coordinator for anything. In my personal opinion it is because of the silly commission. Without commission, no financial adviser would want to be the coordinator of anything. Also, the size of the commission is very important. If it takes 3 hours to close a case selling a product costing $12,000 in commission, why would he bothered to coordinate with other professionals over 30 hours who probably give him a fraction of a introducing fee? I repeated myself to the cow come home and going to repeat again that financial practitioners who want to break away from their silly salesmanship need to change their business model to one of charging fee.

Anyway, due to my recent interest in writing articles on estate planning, I did receive quite a number of queries via emails and telephone calls. However, in most cases I have to reject their cases. Why? Because most of these interested persons appeared to want me to be a “product salesman.” Almost all of them called me that they want to setup a living trust or a testamentary trust or to have their Will revised. But very few are willing to allow me to conduct a full analysis on their situation. When they told me that they can budget 3 or 4 hours of time to seek my opinion, I will immediate reject them. It is not realistic to know anything within that few hours. It takes more than 20 hours to completely understand the financial situation of a person. If I would to make recommendations without satisfying myself that the recommendations are suitable, wouldn’t this similar as selling some silly product just to earn the silly commission? It does not matter whether the “product” is a Will, Trust or whatever. As long as recommendations were made without a complete understanding of a client’s situation, it is considered PRODUCT PUSHING.

So sorry folks, no product pushing for me. If I cannot be convinced and be satisfied that the recommendations are suitable, I prefer to drop the case altogether. There are many product pushers in the marketplace already. I am not keen to be part of it.