Have you gotten tired yet of paying the five, ten or twenty thousand dollars a year that you’re currently paying your financial planner?

You should think about taking a do-it-yourself approach to financial planning. By following a handful of steps, you can actually plan and manage your personal finances yourself. And as long as you’re thoughtful and careful, the job you do will beat the performance of about 99% of financial planners and registered investment advisors.

Seriously, firing your financial planner is easier than you think. You simply need to follow five steps:

Step #1: Learn to Invest Passively Using Index Funds

The first step in firing your financial planner or investment advisor is learning how and why passive investing works–and then committing to using passive investing as the foundation of your wealth-building.

If you don’t use a financial planner or investment advisor to pick your investments or make investment recommendations, you’ll need to come up with your investments. And passive investing provides an easy, powerful way to do this.

In a nutshell, with passive investing, you don’t try to pick the best investments. Rather, you buy all the possible investments. And, the weird thing is, you actually do better using passive investing because the cost of making bad investment choices is less than the fees a financial planner charges.

You can begin your research into passive investing by reading about index funds on various investment web sites. But you should also take the time to read one or both of a couple of books, The Random Walk Guide To Investing by Burton G. Malkiel, an economics professor at Princeton University and The Little Book of Common Sense Investing by John Bogle, the founder of the Vanguard Group, a mutual fund company powerhouse.

Step #2: Get Serious About Retirement Saving

After you learn how passive investing works–and why you’ll always use an index fund if you have the choice–you need to get serious about your retirement saving.

Specifically, if you work someplace where your employer provides a 401(k) or similar retirement savings option, you need to participate. At a minimum, you want to participate at a level that means you get any “free matching money” the employer provides. And if you can save more money, even better.

If you work someplace where your employer doesn’t provide something like a 401(k), you need to use (and ideally maximize contributions to) an individual retirement account.

Almost always, people who use 401(k)s and individual retirement accounts to invest in a small handful of index funds build wealth much faster and with much less risk than people who use financial planners.

Step #3: Play Worst-case Scenario with your Finances

Here’s a third step you should take. Grab a pencil and pad of paper and list your family’s financial worst-case scenarios. You’re going to include scenarios like “loss of income due to death of the breadwinner,” “catastrophic medical expenses,” “disability of breadwinner,” and so forth.

To the extent that it’s practical, you want to buy cheap insurance to mitigate these worst-case scenario risks. For example, you want to buy cheap renewable term life insurance for the family’s breadwinner(s). You want to buy major medical insurance for family members. And, if possible, you want to acquire long-term disability for the family’s breadwinner(s).

Cheap insurance–which insurance agents often don’t like to sell–provides an effective way to minimize your biggest financial risks.

Step #4: Keep Your Finances Simple

A fourth quick step: Work to keep your financial affairs simple. Don’t put money into complicated investments. Don’t buy complex financial products. Don’t let your finances get disorganized.

Complexity doesn’t save you money. Complexity costs money. Furthermore, complexity leads to mistakes.

Step #5: Make Sure You’ll Pay Off Your Mortgage Before Retirement

A fifth final tip or step: Make sure you’ll have your mortgage fully repaid before you retire–and preferably well before you retire.

Related to this point, if you receive a windfall–perhaps an inheritance or an unusually large bonus from an employer–use part of the after-tax proceeds to accelerate your mortgage pay down.

Paying off your mortgage well before retirement should mean that you’re in good shape to retire when the time comes. And “siphoning off” a portion of any windfalls for accelerated mortgage repayment will mean that at least some part of any financial windfalls you receive get used for wealth-building.

As the owner of an accounting business, you know that finding clients is an important task, but retaining those clients-especially once you’ve started to tap your ideal market-is just as important.

You can have the best marketing system in the world bringing in new clients but if you don’t have a client retention system in place, you will not have much growth.
Client retention can be challenging: if you knew a problem was developing, you would fix it. So by definition, when you lose a client, you probably didn’t know a problem was coming.

What we can do, though, is predict what problems are likely to drive clients to seek a new firm and prevent those problems from happening in the first place. The single biggest complaint that small business owners have about their accountants is “My CPA doesn’t stay in touch with me.” That is by far the biggest reason why a client will change their CPA…..because the CPA does not stay in touch with his or her client.

So, if you want to retain your clients, a keystone of your client retention system will be a regular program that makes sure you keep in regular touch with each client. Don’t wait for them to get in touch: be proactive and be in touch often.

You may be asking yourself, how many times do I recommend that you should stay in touch with your customers in the course of say a year?

The answer is: at least 24 times per year. For my CPA Practice it is more like 60-70 times per year.

How in the world do we keep in touch with our clients so often? We have a system with several components. Some of the components go to everyone on our list on a regular basis: a monthly newsletter, a card at Thanksgiving, and a weekly Ezine. (Are you counting? We’re already up to 65 contacts a year.) Other items are personalized and rely on keeping an accurate calendar: a card on the anniversary of our business relationship, semi-annual “Thank you for your business” cards, a birthday card or gift (I advise my clients to spend up to 5% of their revenues on gifts to their clients), a couple of personal phone calls (you could substitute a personal visit).

Put each of these systems into place and look at how quickly the touches add up:

Monthly newsletter12
Birthday card or gift1
Anniversary of biz relationship 1
Thanksgiving card1
Thank you postcard2
Weekly Ezine52
Personal visits1
Personal phone calls 2

That’s 60 – 70 touches per year. Your clients get not only the feeling of a personal relationship but also a sense of value added. Notice how there are components to yield both perceptions (newsletters and Ezines give them solid information; cards and calls make the relationship personal). With a client retention system like this, you can avoid the top complaint clients have about accountants and increase your client retention dramatically.

With the ease and low cost of electronic communication, some CPA practitioners question the value of continuing to send paper newsletters. Paper newsletters serve some functions that electronic communications can’t, and that makes them valuable as a way to grow your CPA practice.

A customized newsletter that is sent to all your clients and prospects can be a very powerful tool to increase client retention, cross sell other services and obtain referrals. They still prefer paper to electronic communications; the paper newsletter will give them that “valued customer” feeling.

Done well, a newsletter can help to position you as an expert. The newsletter is an opportunity to reinforce your central marketing message. And depending on how often you issue the newsletter, it immediately increases your number of contacts or touches per year to help you retain clients. In addition, if your newsletter is interesting and attractive, it might find its way into the hands of potential clients you haven’t even identified yet.

What should go in your newsletter? Be sure to include timely issues based on the date that issue will come out (still time to make charitable contributions for this tax year, etc.) But also be sure you’re filling the newsletters with material that will be of interest to your clients. It doesn’t have to be 100% related to your services-if there’s a trade show or conference coming to a nearby city that will interest a large number of your clients and prospects, why not include some information about it in your newsletter?

Also, when brainstorming for content, take a quick inventory of your expertise. Have you had unusual clients, who have familiarized you with a particular niche of clientele? Have you pursued continuing education in a particular area? Do you have personal knowledge-say, from a previous career or a hobby-that might be of interest to your clients? Something new, fresh, and interesting can help keep readers from setting the newsletter aside without reading it.

Here are the subsections of my newsletter:

• Welcome & main article
• New tax laws or a tax reduction strategy
• Client feedback / testimonial
• Ask for referral or cross sell other services
• Humor / jokes / short interesting articles on a variety of topics
• Q & A

As far as getting the newsletter into print goes, the skills you need are relatively easy to acquire. If you have an administrative assistant, that person should either have or develop these skills. They’re valuable not only for newsletters but for other printed materials you might want to use to promote your practice from time to time.

If you’ve never done this kind of marketing before, you might want to start with a quarterly newsletter and later shift to monthly. As time goes on, you’ll start thinking of ideas for the newsletter without even trying. Also pay attention to newsletters you receive. Which ones do you read? Which ones do you toss without a second glance? Paying attention to your own reading habits can help you think about ways to make your own newsletter a keeper.

A customized newsletter that is sent to all your clients and prospects can be a very powerful tool to increase client retention, cross sell other services and obtain referrals.

When it comes to selling things, the human tendency to package can make life easier. When you’re marketing yourself and trying to sign on new clients, you’ll want to take full advantage of aspect of human psychology. Bundle services together and suddenly a new client will be bringing you as much business as two or three clients in the past.

When it comes to buying things, packages are attractive because they seem to simplify the client’s life. If an insurance company offers me a package deal on car insurance, home owner’s insurance, and life insurance, suddenly I have so many fewer decisions to make-and I don’t have to deal with three different insurance agents. I might save some money, but even if I don’t, I save aggravation and time, and most people value their time as much as their money. Costco or BJ’s Club are good examples of packaging in the retail world, and the number of people that flock to these giant stores indicate the popularity of packaging. Fast food places have the value meal, which is a package of a sandwich, fries and a drink.

What is also important is to offer different packages, i.e. to give the client options. When I first started out, I offered piecemeal services at standard rates. Then I realized that clients work in a different way. Many people like options. They don’t want to be “forced” into taking something that doesn’t suit them. They want the option of small, medium and large. Going to the example I gave of the restaurant, they have a small value meal, medium or large.

”Small, medium, or large” doesn’t quite work for accounting services. The principle I use to distinguish between levels of service is this: the more accessibility to me and to my staff a package offers the client, the higher the fees. So while we can custom tailor the service package to fit their needs, nonetheless the services are packaged based on frequency.

In addition to packaging your services, you should consider cross-selling. Many years ago I learnt while attending a seminar by the legendary marketer Jay Abrahams that there are 3 ways to grow your practice:

1) Increase number of new clients
2) Increase the fees paid by each client
3) Increase the frequency of purchase or sell the same client more services

Cross selling is the way the CPA practitioner increases the frequency of purchase.

When you have a relationship with the client, you can offer them other services that will help the client. How does one go about finding out the services that your clients need? Not to oversimplify it, but really, the best way to find out is by asking. We recently conducted a survey and we called up most of my business clients to ask them how we were scoring and what else we could do that could help them. It’s really very instructive to hear the clients’ perspective on things. I have also found this to be one of the best ways to find out other services we should be providing.

Here’s a partial list of additional services to offer:

• Financial planning or wealth management services
• QuickBooks consulting – Outsourced accounting (A couple of years, we packaged our QuickBooks consulting services as either a 10-hour package or a 20-hour package, to be used in one year.)
• Audit protection
• Business consulting
• Business valuation services
• Payroll services
• Controllership services

Using this list as a starting point, talk to your clients and find out what services they need that you could offer. Specialize in what your target clients want, and you’re just about certain to grow your practice.