A guest blog from Ameeta Panessar, financial adviser and Founder of Orelle Private Wealth.

We all know that wealth planning encapsulates obvious areas, for example, investment planning and estate planning. But the real beauty of the process is that a client’s goals and aspirations should always be at the forefront of the planning conversations. What does a client really want to achieve in a certain number of years? How do they want to look after their families during their lifetime? What do they want to leave behind when they are gone?

The thing is, though, that in order to really get this right – particularly the last point, we have to understand what actually matters to our clients. The kinds of things that are truly deep-rooted, the values they hold, the feelings that are not always surface level. Causes that sit close to their hearts.

It isn’t always easy to get clients to open up in this way. Some clients may feel it is unnecessary to talk about causes that are important to them during wealth planning conversations because they don’t feel it is relevant, they may feel as though their adviser doesn’t particularly care about these things, or it could be that they are simply unaware of the options available to them when it comes to legacy giving and understanding how it can all fit together within the process.

Yes, a lot of it is down to our ability as advisers to build those relationships, but it’s also about how we actually integrate the topic of legacy and philanthropy into our conversations with clients. It’s not something that forms part of our formal advice process and so starting to incorporate these conversations might not feel like the easiest thing to do.

But it’s an area that needs focus. Advisers play such an important role because we have so many more touchpoint opportunities to explore this area with clients than we might realise – initial meetings, client reviews, key life events, estate planning conversations, environmental, social, and governance (ESG) conversations – the list goes on. Once broached, these conversations could allow clients to feel as though they have a safe space to openly talk about what really matters to them.