Perspective

I spent the last two days in Dallas, Texas with a PFP (Personal Financial Planning) Study group sponsored by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, AICPA. This group consists of CPA financial planners dedicated to serving clients with the utmost integrity, care and concern.

Our purpose is to share our wisdom with each other, and to provide best practices for our profession. This was my third time with this group and I am amazed each time by the incredible technical talent in the room. More importantly, I am humbled at the quality of compassion each individual brings to their clients.

We participated in a conference call with a well respected economist and also shared our views with each other. My take-aways from our discussions were:

• The current economic crisis is an extreme cycle of fear. This time is not different, just the reasons are different.
• No, this exact set of circumstances has not happened before. And yet, the economic conditions occurring today have happened before.
• Markets always cycle. The cause of the cycle may be different, but the cycles come regardless. Timing and length of the cycle’s ups and downs is the unknown.
• This is a consumer lead recession making it likely that this downturn will be deeper and longer than the 2001 recession where we saw no contraction in spending.
• This recession could be shallow or deep. There are too many variables to determine at this time.
• The actions the government is taking are appropriate and will assist in the recovery. It will take time for these actions to reflect in the financial markets.

Over and over it is clear that to predict the financial markets is folly. What we must do is understand our clients’ goals and prepare investment and financial plans that clearly provide for their cash flow needs in the short term while positioning their portfolios for growth in the long term.

As I left Dallas, I was clear that that our asset allocation approach to investing wrapped inside our award winning Prosperity Planning™ services put us in the top echelon of our profession and in sync with the best of the best in our industry.

While that may not make the news of the day any easier to hear, it provides me with the confidence to keep showing up and doing the best every day for our clients.

May prosperity be yours,
Mackey McNeill, CPA/PFS, IAR
President and CEO
Mackey Advisors
www.CultivatingProsperity.com
859-331-7755
Mackey@CultivatingProsperity.com