Welcome everyone! Welcome to the 509th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast!
My guest on today’s podcast is Dana Anspach. Dana is the founder of Sensible Money, an RIA based in Scottsdale, Arizona, that oversees $850 million in assets under management for 330 client households.
What’s unique about Dana, though, is how she has stood out as a retirement planning expert by leaning into decumulation planning and running multiple tests on client plans to give them greater confidence that they will meet their retirement goals.
In this episode, we talk in-depth about how Dana holds a first meeting with new clients that includes a rough analysis of whether they appear to be on track to meet their retirement goals (where she leverages Monte Carlo analysis but is willing to accept a probability of success well below 100%), how Dana further tests client plans by calculating a fundedness ratio (comparing the present value of cash flows a client needs to the current value of their assets) that she likes to see be at least 110% or higher, and how Dana also leverages historical data to stress test client portfolios across a range of return sequences that actually occurred.
We also talk about how Dana takes an asset-liability matching approach to portfolio management that seeks to generate sufficient cash flow to meet clients’ lifestyle spending needs over the following five to eight years (further boosting their confidence that they could endure a market downturn), how Dana measures whether clients are ahead of a ‘critical path’ to identify opportunities to sell equities following periods of strong returns and extend their income ladder, and how Dana’s firm serves as the ‘architect’ for designing these client portfolios but works alongside a partner firm to execute them.
And be certain to listen to the end, where Dana shares why she uses her own in-house retirement planning software rather than commercially available products, why Dana decided to stop offering standalone financial plans (even though they had previously been a good business line for her firm), and how Dana has navigated the challenges that come with leading a growing firm (including the need to be judicious with language to avoid setting unintended expectations for team members).
