Nitrogen Wealth | Be the Advisor Your Spouse Wants You to Be

How to maintain work/life balance as a financial advisor

For years now, industry commentators and even leaders in WealthTech have been making the case that technology can make you a better financial advisor.

It’s important to be the best advisor that you can be—and here at Nitrogen, we’re committed to developing solutions that aid advisors like you in the pursuit to be the best professional you can be.

But there are a lot of relationships in your life, and the way you work (and how much time you spend working) impacts all of them.

So we wondered: Is it possible for the technology you use to help you become a better, more well-rounded person outside of work too, even if those benefits might be indirect?

Is Working in Finance Good for Your Health?

Depictions of financial professionals in popular media can make it seem like the industry only attracts workaholics and people who don’t balance their life well.

There might be some truth to that, but it also might be more of an American stereotype than anything else.

After all, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development ranks countries on work/life balance and tags America 28th out of the 36 nations it studied.

When you look at finance specifically, though, the stats aren’t too rosy. In fact, finance is often ranked as one of the most stressful and least balanced professions in the United States.

With these kinds of averages and statistics, is it realistic for the average financial advisor to expect to be done with work on time every day and actually be there for their family and spouse?

The Great Reset of Work/Life Balance

When work/life gets too one-sided, burnout becomes a real concern for professional workers across industries—including financial professionals.

Oddly enough, though, the pandemic has led to more overall satisfaction with working arrangements. One survey found that 86% of remote workers feel good about their work situation at home.

That great reset of work/life balance wouldn’t be possible without technology.

Applications like Zoom, Slack, and other cloud-based software provided the opportunity to take workers out of the advisory firm offices and keep businesses running.

But as life changes and expectations about when (and where) we work take on new meaning, being the type of person your spouse wants you to be may come down to how efficiently you can get your work done from anywhere.

Two spouses or partners working from home might mean that there’s an overabundance of productive time spent around each other—but a deficit of quality time.

So how do you navigate relationships and make space for quality time that matters?

The answer: Get your work done faster.

And that’s how Nitrogen can help you become the advisor your spouse wants you to be.

Doing the Work That Matters—Faster

There’s a whole host of tasks that can take financial advisors hours and hours in a day, severely cutting into the time they can spend focusing on their family instead of their business.

One major thing that can cut into “away from the office” time are clients who don’t have the right expectations for their investments.

A big part of an advisor’s role is to help their clients understand their investments and what types of swings their portfolio might experience. This type of education is at the heart of the Risk Number^®.

When a client understands the upper and lower ranges they should expect from their portfolio under average conditions (e.g. anything outside of a Black Swan event), they’re far less likely to call their advisor in a panic on the weekend or at night with questions about what’s happening during a market downturn.

Fearful clients don’t tend to help an advisor with a positive work/life balance.

In fact, they do the opposite. And while that’s not the type of life an advisor wants to lead, it’s also not the type of life a client wants to be living either. By being an advisor who uses technology to give clients confidence and understanding, you can improve everyone’s lives.

“Now that my clients know their Risk Number and understand their 95% Historical Range, my phone no longer rings off the hook when markets are volatile.” – Shay, Nitrogen advisor in Florida

Setting better client expectations leads to better clients in both the short and long run.

While relationships and phone calls can extend the day, there’s also another time-consuming task that advisors have had to deal with, oftentimes in spreadsheets with manual calculators they’ve built: rebalancing portfolios.

For some advisors, that process could take hours, days—even weeks!

But with Nitrogen Trading, advisors across the country are saying goodbye to weeks-long portfolio rebalancing sprints each quarter.

Instead, they’re operating like Nathan Harro and turning trading processes that took hours into single-click workflows.

“When an account needs to be rebalanced, Nitrogen has automated that whole approval process into one click. The time saved is tremendous.”

But for some advisors, trading is merely another piece in a too-large tech stack that doesn’t integrate properly.

Instead of entering information once and moving on, their days are spent double-checking data in one system against another.

Meanwhile, their spouse has finished work for the day and is two episodes ahead of them in their latest Netflix binge.

The problem typically starts before actually setting up an integration and finding that it doesn’t work the way a salesperson might have framed it. It goes all the way back to when an advisor picks out the solutions in their tech stack in the first place.

If you’re looking for the right pieces of the puzzle in your tech stack, it’s time to put the computer away so you can stop surfing demos and only half paying attention to what’s happening in Bridgerton.

Choose the right tech stack right away and be done in minutes instead of spending hours a day for months on end trying to find friendly technology solutions.

The Build My Tech Stack tool will have your due diligence done for you before you can even skip the intro credits.

Now, you can put your time into whatever you (or your spouse) want.

So learn how to bake that braided French bread. Install some new tile in your master bathroom. Or just sit back and relax together.

You’ll be spending your time building relationships with the most important people in your life instead of extending “office hours” at the home office.