For the millions of Americans whose trillions of student loan dollars have been in forbearance these past three years, foreboding emails are now landing in inboxes on a weekly basis: payments resume October 1, please contact your servicer, update your billing information, ensure your direct deposit is set up. The clock is ticking, and these high-earning, high-debt clients need answers now.
Enter: financial advisors. With the right tools, knowledgeable advisors can seize this moment to quickly provide value to these attractive clients on urgent questions, building long-lasting relationships with high-earners entering their accumulation years.
Finology Software is a powerful, modern new tool for advisors looking to add student loan repayment planning and analyses to their practice. One advisor capturing this growing segment is Caitlyn Driehorst, who leads RightWise Wealth, an RIA in Las Vegas, NV that serves young professionals. Driehorst leverages Finology Software to help high-earning, high-debt clients understand their complex loan picture and create plans to tackle their debt.
“Clients can realize tremendous value in working with an advisor to address student loan questions,” says Driehorst. “Of course, the technicals are significant and an advisor can add meaningful, quantifiable value in optimizing a client’s total payoff package. But also, an advisor can help a client work through the strong feelings that often accompany education debt and can make a client reluctant to confront their debt picture.”
Typically, for advisors, overcoming client inertia can be one of the most challenging parts of growing a book of business. “Clients often want to work with an advisor precisely because they are so busy and they need to outsource their financial picture,” says Driehorst. “But compared to the challenges of getting children to sports practice and showing for work obligations, clients can feel like rolling over that old IRA can be postponed to a future day when life is calmer — but we all know that day may or may not ever come. However, for clients who face significant payments resuming in October 2023 — they have a real deadline and need answers now.”
Finology Software’s efficiency makes it a powerful tool to complement growth in an advisor’s practice. “One of the greatest challenges with student loan planning is getting the client’s data,” says Driehorst. “A client may say that they have $70,000 in debt, but it’s actually five different loans with different terms, interest rates and forgiveness characteristics. Walking a client through the steps to download PDFs from so many debt servicers can take a lot of time. But Finology Software’s quick data importing solution scrapes Federal student loan data instantly with a drag-and-drop upload of a single file.”
Alex Bottom, CEO, founded and launched Finology Software precisely for this moment and these advisor conversations. “For the past forty-odd months, the majority of borrowers have been in forbearance. During that time, they’ve had children, purchased homes, changed jobs — their financial picture may be entirely different from March 2020. These borrowers are looking for financial guidance, and financial advisors require software to add robust student debt analyses to their financial plans — without increasing operational complexity. We’re excited to work with RightWise Wealth and other RIAs in serving this critical client population.”
**
Are you looking to add student debt planning to your practice, but still catching up to the many recent changes to student loan programs? Finology Software can be your partner in this unique moment in time for the return to repayment for federal student loans. For a limited time, Finology Software advisor relationship managers are available for expert-to-expert consults to ensure financial advisors onboard smoothly into the platform and to answer planning questions related to client student loan debt. Reach out to info@finology.tech for a demo to see our modern web-based application in action.
