TRANSCRIPT:
What’s up internet? My name is Ian Bloom. Welcome to Open World Financial Life Planning’s second year anniversary video. I am your resident Financial Life Planner and huge nerd. I am coming to you from the porch of a cabin up in Burnsville, North Carolina, because I’m on my biannual retreat. I try to get away for a week, twice a year, to just work on content like this, to write and to focus on the next six months of what the firm needs from me. And so I just wanted to bring you this update video from a different location, on a screened in porch is as good a place as any. I’m sorry if the creek sound is drowning me out a little bit, but I will try to tamp that down in the edit. So in any case, let’s start off with some wins and losses for the year.
My first big win is always my clients. Thank you guys so much for enabling the firm to grow and for enabling me to do what I love every day. It’s so much fun to work with you guys and to see the progress that each of you is making, not just financially, but also on the lives that you want to be living. And that is just inspiring and wonderful, so thank you. The second big one that I have is professional development. I personally was able to go to Hana, Hawaii to learn how to be a better life planner, this year. I enrolled in the five day program of the registered life planning curriculum. And I know that Hawaii sounds like a nice relaxing vacation, but I actually spent about 12 hours a day for five days, working really, really hard to learn how to become better at what I do. Life planning is that more than financial aspect of what I do, that enables me to help learn more about the why, behind the financial plan.
And I think that, that’s super important. So becoming a registered life planner, which I will be by the end of the year, is of utmost importance to me. The third and final one that I wanted to celebrate for this year, is the technology upgrade that we are actually about to go through. The technology upgrade is on the investment management side. So we are going to be using a new Custodian Altruist. And the cool thing about Altruist is that it’s just way cleaner and smoother UI. So it’ll be a lot prettier to look at, if you are a client with our investment management service, and then also it will enable a little bit easier paperwork and those sorts of things. Finally, it saves you money. Altruist was less expensive than our stapled together, double solution that we were using prior to now. And as a result, you will save some money on fees. So win, win, win.
Now let’s spend a moment talking about a couple of losses, because I think they need to be called out when they’re there. The first loss is really the state of the world right now. As with everybody, it’s not as if the Coronavirus, the economic unrest and the battle that’s constantly going on with systemic racism have not affected me, or the firm, or our growth, or our plants. It’s simply the way that it is. The state of the world is not great right now and obviously that has cascading effects on myself and then all of you. So I hope that the world is kinder in 2021, and that we are able to make progress in some of these serious issues that plague us, in one case literally. And that leads me into the second point of, content. I think content’s a small loss this year, as well. While I do put out a ton of content all the time, I was unable to write the book by the firm anniversary deadline, that I had set for myself, this year. So personal, small loss.
But then also the content in general, while it’s, I think pretty decent, just hasn’t grown at the rate that I wanted it too. And this goes back to a side quest, that I identified for myself years ago, which is that frankly, there just aren’t enough good financial voices making a lot of internet content. I just want to be able to defeat the YouTube ads that are claiming that you can earn tons of money really fast all the time, or that they have the perfect investing strategy. It’s just not realistic and I think that you, as a member of the American public, deserve much, much better advice. So I’m hoping that myself and my colleagues are able to continue to make progress in this way, in a way that we haven’t before. I think certified Financial Planners seem to have a much, more larger voice in the financial education that is going on out in the community.
So that’s why I consider this a loss. We certainly have hit a hundred YouTube subscribers, and I’m super happy about that, the TikTok channel is doing well, all of those things are great. I just really feel a sense of personal responsibility for making sure that the educational content, on the finance side, out there is good. So finally wrapping up, overall, thank you so much for enabling me to do the work that I do. Whether it is because you’re a YouTube viewer or because you’re a client or because you’ve sent me a message one day just saying, “Hey, thanks so much for what you do. It’s really cool that you’re doing it.” All of those things go a long way towards keeping the firm going and keeping me in the game. So I really appreciate that. I’m really, really thankful for this last year of doing what I love. And I hope that this next year is kind, both to me and to you guys. Thanks so much, have a wonderful day and a great next year.
