As you are running your financial advising practice, you will most likely encounter all types of people coming to you for advice on how to manage their savings and their life. Using empathetic skills along with demographic trends, you can adjust your advising to suit a complex range of people and grow out your business accordingly. Being flexible and dynamic is something that everyone will look for in a service like financial advising. You don’t want to be rigid and scare certain people off because they feel like you can’t relate to them. Young professionals are some of the hardest people to advise for due to potentially complex history and naturally less experience with financial planning. Here are some tips on how to advise for young professionals.

Future Goals

The young professionals bracket would include individuals from 20 to 29 years old, typically recent university graduates all the way up to newly weds. Depending on what stage of their life they may be at, it is important to recognize that everyone in this bracket may have very different life goals. Some could be looking further down the line at saving for a house or car, while others may have ambitions for travelling. Forbes reports that 45% of millennials are not saving for retirement, which is something advisors can always be reminding them of. Highlighting the importance of retirement saving can go a long way, especially if you can make it seem very straight forward, like opening up an 401K account. Retirement can seem like a daunting event that isn’t even worth thinking about for young people but with the right advise, you can help them plan for the future.

Tech Savvy

Young professionals are very comfortable with technology and this is something that advisors can use to their advantage. Robo advisors are taking a chunk out of the market but if you can implement a way in which younger clients can use both technology and your advising, it will create more trust. There are a number of apps available that you can recommend to clients to keep them up to date on investments and also use to invest as well. When advising young professionals, use technology as a strength and something that you can add on to your services. As a result they will respect your opinion more as you will seem more capable.

Protection

As these individuals are just starting their career, a regular wage is new and exciting so clinging onto the new income is very much a priority. A CNBC study found that millennials’ most important expectation from an advisor is to protect their investments from a market downturn. As a result, you must be on top of industry trends and come across as knowledgeable on how the markets are behaving. Young professionals will see you as a guardian to their money so being convincing in your advice and relating it to external research is how to appeal to this age group.

As your business grows and you come into contact with different and hopefully younger clients, it is vital that you stay ahead of trends and appeal to every type of demographic. Taking a good look at young professionals future goals, using technology strategically and being protection against external threats are ways to progress your advising model.