Saturday, August 9, 2025

Can advisors harness young clients’ new year energy before it runs out?

Holt-Robinson and Lalehparvar say that while they’ll often see people commit to sustainable strategies like budgeting and investing a fixed amount each month, there are also sometimes expectations that changes can be made rapidly and with single actions. A client may want to make one big lump-sum investment, or may come with expectations of rapid returns. It’s there where they seek to temper expectations and ensure a commitment to financial betterment isn’t too onerous.

“The fact that it sometimes becomes unsustainable as the year goes on is actually a lot more psychological than anything else,” Lalehparvar says. “People need to learn not to be a tyrant about their own habits, because anybody would get crushed under that kind of pressure. So by the end of January, people get crushed and they revert to old habits.”

The Skyward team approaches their clients’ resolutions with a mixture of encouragement and temperance. They try to channel the goals that people set for themselves into sustainable pathways, while emphasizing which expectations are realistic and which expectations aren’t.

Coming off a bull market, as well as a run up in the price of bitcoin, can be challenging for advisors in terms of that expectation-setting. Working with young clients who may not have experienced a bear market, or might be more susceptible to social-media driven FOMO, there is a concern that they might expect last year’s returns to repeat themselves. In the face of those expectations, Holt-Robinson and Lalehparvar say that advisors need to focus on financial literacy education. The better educated a client is the more realistic their expectations should be.

Advisors working with these young energetic clients are fundamentally having to play both cheerleader and coach. They need to encourage the energy while ensuring expectations stay realistic. In their own practice, Holt-Robinson and Lalehparvar use this time of year for new client outreach, expecting to appear right at the moment when a young person is thinking about their long-term financial plans and goals.

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