In today’s Office Hours, Eric answers Robert’s question: If your close friend is a financial advisor and keeps telling you how to manage your money, how do you get them to stop?
This can be an uncomfortable situation and sometimes you don’t want to mix business and friendships. And it goes both ways. Are you an advisor constantly being pestered for free advice on your time off? Here’s how to handle it.
Have a question? Tweet it to us at @BrotmanPlanning and it may be answered in a future episode of Office Hours!
[00:00:00] Eric Brotman: This is Eric Brotman, the host of Don’t retire… Graduate!: The podcast that teaches you how to advance into retirement rather than retreating. Welcome to office hours where we answer listeners’ questions about personal finance, retirement readiness, and more. We received a question from Robert who asked: if your close friend is a financial advisor and keeps telling you how to manage your money, how can you get them to stop? And Robert, this is this is a nine headed Hydra of a question. So I’m going to try and answer it lots of different ways.
First of all, specific to your situation. If you have a friend who’s a financial advisor who won’t stop harping on you about about money or finances or these kinds of things, the best way to get them to stop, quite frankly, in my opinion is to ask them to. Just be polite and say, you know what? I would rather maintain our friendship on a level where we’re talking about other things. We’re talking about our high school experience, our college experience, our kids’ lives, or the hockey game we’re attending, but let’s not talk about money.
I, I really, I want our friendship to be separate from that conversation. And I would be forthright about it and say, look, I know you’re trying to help. I really appreciate it. But either I already have a financial advisor or I really that’s the last thing I want to spend my Saturday talking about and so forth.
That said, I think beyond this specific situation, there’s a much bigger answer to your question, Robert. And that is that doing business with friends can be an incredibly slippery slope. In some ways, you want your friends to seek you out or to be resources for you, whether they’re contractors who are going to do a new kitchen for you, whether you’re buying a new car, or whether you’re doing financial planning, it’s nice to work with friends.
It’s nice to work with people you know and trust and have known a long time. On the other hand, if a business relationship sours for any reason, it can affect a friendship in really unpredictable ways. So as a financial advisor myself, I made a point early in my career, and I’ve been doing this 30 years, never to solicit a friend ever. I never, ever wanted to be that person a who you talk about trying to get to stop or be who folks are going to shy away from in an elevator. I never, ever wanted to do that. So people know what I do and sometimes friends will seek me out for professional reasons. And I love that. I welcome that. But it’s also really important that our friendship comes first and that any business relationship, which by the way, may not be permanent, doesn’t ruin a friendship that by all means should be permanent. So it’s a really difficult thing and it almost doesn’t matter what business you’re in but in the financial world specifically, people don’t want to talk about money, especially on their free time. And I shouldn’t, I shouldn’t paint everybody with that same brush.
There are lots of people who love to talk about money. Frankly, I’m one of them. It’s what I do. But if that’s all I talked about, I would stop getting invited to dinner parties, you know? And that’s okay. So when I’m with friends even when I’m with friends, some of whom are clients of ours. I make it a point to wear a friend hat and not wear my planner hat and not bring up financials at all.
And in fact, if a friend asks me a question, which by the way that the shoes often on the other foot. I can’t tell you how often friends will approach me and say, Hey, what do you think of this financial decision? And I want to say to them the same thing, which is, you know what, I’m off duty right now. We’re, we’re taking in a basketball game. We’re having some fun. I really don’t want to talk about that. That’s talking about work. It’s kind of like if your friend was a doctor and you guys went to dinner together, you probably wouldn’t roll up your sleeve and say, what do you think of this mark on my arm? You know, that’s just not something people do.
So I think it’s a, two-way street. I think if you have a friend who’s an advisor and who won’t stop trying to give you advice that perhaps you’re not open to or wanting, be honest. Just say, listen, we’re we’re here. We’re having fun. You’re you’re my dear friend. We’ve been friends a long time. I really don’t want to talk about that.
And if they continue to persist, ultimately you have to decide whether this is somebody you want to have dinner with again. And that’s the unfortunate truth. Hopefully they’ll be respectful of your wishes.
On the other hand, if the shoe is on the other foot and people are constantly coming to you for advice about what you do professionally and it’s during your free time, it’s okay to have boundaries and say, I’m happy to discuss that with you. I would love to have a conversation with you about that. Can we do it Monday? Because right now we really just want to enjoy some time with our, with our families or with our other friends or doing whatever we’re doing.
Robert, it’s a, it’s a tough, tough situation. You know, on the one hand you want to work with people you know and like and trust. On the other hand, you don’t want friendships impacted by business relationships and vice versa. So it really comes down to setting some boundaries, setting some ground rules, and being really honest, not only with the other person, but with yourself. So I’m no therapist, but I hope that’s the best I can do on this particular question. I think this comes up in more businesses than just financial planning, but it certainly comes up for us on a constant basis.
So, Robert, thanks for your question. Really, really terrific. If you’d like to send us a question, which we might answer in a future episode of Office Hours, post it on our Facebook page or tweet us at @BrotmanPlanning. If you like, what you hear, please subscribe to our podcast and leave a review on apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Please also check out our books, workbooks and online financial literacy resources at brotmanmedia.com. Thanks for coming to office hours. Be sure to tune in for new content every Thursday. For now, this is your host, Eric Brotman, reminding you don’t retire. Graduate.
