Kirby Rosplock
Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today. Our webinar today is on from ideas to action. Implementing education with affluent families. I'm Torri Hawley. I'm the Director of Client Learning Experience and today I am joined by Kirby Rosplock.
Kirby Rosplock
Hi there. We're really excited for this webinar. We've got 45 minutes to hopefully wow you with some ideas about how to get going with learning and share with you some cool tools that we're pretty excited about. Do you want me to just jump in and talk a little bit about how we got to Tamarind learning? Because I think it's kind of strange. Most people say, 'Kirby, I thought you did consulting for families and family offices and ultra high net worth.?' And that is true. So Tamarind Partners was started almost ten years ago, which is crazy. But in the midst of a lot of the education that we were doing with families, we recognized that sometimes they just needed a durable learning curriculum that could sort of support them wherever they were. If they had a family member who was leading education or they had an advisor who was already in that role, we wanted to create something that was scalable but durable and something that could be used flexibly. So that's essentially Tamarind Learning, learning that manifested around 2019 and officially launched in 2020. And so we built a learning management system with our flagship program, the Accredited Beneficiary Stewardship program.
Kirby Rosplock
I think you're going to talk about that in a little bit, so I won't go into detail there, but imagine being able to have education in the cloud in a way that was accessible, secure, private, and anywhere, anytime. So you can jump in there and get actionable. And at the same time, it's a sort of community kind of learning experience where you have the ability to also learn with an advisor, a family office provider, anyone who you want to be in your trusted circle, if that makes sense. So that's where the advisor relationship is so key and where we want to foster that rapport, because we think learning is just a great way for advisors and clients to build stronger relationships.
Torri Hawley
Definitely. And I just want to say on that note, in terms of learning, if you have any questions, feel free to drop them in the chat and we will address them at the end as well. And I'm going to share a little bit about our curriculum just really quickly so you know more about what we do. So we offer this online curriculum. It's ten courses, and we include everything from stewardship, what it means to inherit wealth, how you inherit wealth responsibly, and steward it into future generations to what it means to be on either side of a trust. So, as a trust inheritor or as a trust beneficiary. And then we cover some pretty technical stuff in estate, trust and tax. What we want here is for our learners to be empowered. We're not asking them to go out and be a tax attorney or anything like that, but when we have inheritors or we have affluent families, they need to have these skills. And the last piece is, of course, that personal finance, financial literacy is so, so valuable in affluent families. And also trust administration, working with advisors and investing fundamentals. So, really a comprehensive, holistic wealth education suite for families or advisors to jump into quickly and provide a wide breadth of topics that are necessary for affluent families.
Kirby Rosplock
Hey, Torri, before you go on, just really quickly, I also wanted to just reiterate that we built this education for, potentially, the family members who are not going to be the operators. So we don't have this embedded bias. We know that about 86% of wealth is transferred in trust to the next generation. Rarely do we have the opportunity to really dig into. What does that mean? So, again, it complements operator learning as well, but it doesn't necessarily require someone to know anything about what they're going to inherit, if they're going to inherit, or have any real details to the broader story that their family is all about. We start with the idea that you can have no knowledge. Right, Torri?
Torri Hawley
Yep, that's perfect. And thanks so much for sharing that and bringing it up. So, I wanted to pose this question about why is education important to affluent families and their advisors? And this is something Kirby and I talk a lot about. So I started to dig into the research and the actual numbers behind it, and I laid out this story that I think is pretty interesting. So, this first is a study of affluent millennials. They're anxious about money, and they have financial insecurity. So there's a lot of fear there. And it's interesting because their parents feel that way, too. So, U.S. Trust found that only 42% of parents high net worth parents believe their kids are ready to inherit wealth. So what's going on here? So, we look at wealth education does not seem to start for affluent families until they're 28 years old. So imagine you're almost 30, you're out of college, and then finally, your parents have said, okay, now we can start talking about wealth. Then we find out, well, it's actually interesting that the earlier you learn about wealth, the more confident you are, the less anxious you are. You're better at managing it because you've been talking about it, it's not this taboo, and you can be really comfortable with it and to manage it responsibly, to be a good steward.
Torri Hawley
So 56% of affluent individuals do their own research, because if you haven't found anything out from your family or advisors or anything like that until you're nearly 30 years old, of course you're going to be looking around, you know that something's coming down the pipe, and so you want to be informed. But the really interesting piece of this to me was that just 5% receive wealth education around these broader aspects of wealth that we cover. Right. Financial literacy is the number one thing. When I go to a conference or I talk to a family, they're like, well, my kids definitely need to know about this. But what else?
Kirby Rosplock
Torri, before you jump to the next slide, I just wanted to jump in and say, think about where you were when you were 28. It's really important to think how much access the ten year old has or the 15 year old has who's Googling and sort of querying about maybe your family name or a company that the family once owned or currently owns. And so there's just so much information that's out there. To think that we're not actually educating till 28, it is a little mind blowing to me.
Torri Hawley
Yeah, absolutely. And I'll talk on the next slide about how this impacts families and advisors. But the thing that we know is that families who pass wealth on, they make human capital a priority, not just financial literacy a priority, although obviously, financial literacy is a huge piece of wealth. So this is relevant to advisors, because advisors, particularly, if they're helping with an education plan, they can guide their clients to be really effective clients for them. Right. So they are performing at high levels. They're asking good questions. You're not having to explain really basic information. And it's not that. It's not your role to do that, but an engaged client is a better client. And the other piece of this is that families need this. They need to be having these conversations because it builds rapport, it creates stickiness, has longevity. So if your goal is to pass on wealth from generation to generation, that education and human capital is at the heart of this. So we are going to help deliver some tools on how you can set up an education plan to help your clients get to this endpoint or to help families get to this endpoint where they're really clear on what they need to know.
Torri Hawley
Tell me a little bit about this advisor's role in learning.
Kirby Rosplock
Yeah. So I think this is an important slide for advisors listening and family members who might also be on the call to think about the role of your advisor and where they fit in the relationship to the learning that may need to happen in your family. Listen, we talk a lot about setting our families up and our next gen up for success, but we also need to think about what is in the best interest of the advisor to deliver or not deliver, because there's some advisors in that top left quadrant who really are technical advisors, typically, but they don't really see themselves as educators. They're not really the nurturing type. They might actually not even be really tuned up to or stylistically good at building that kind of a rapport to mentor. And so I think it's important to understand where you're going to be the most useful relationship to your client. And sometimes it's just referring to other resources, to other coaches, to other learning opportunities. Now, the mentor kind of the top right quadrant is the advisor who really feels comfortable. And this is in their wheelhouse, and this is something that they like to do, they want to do, and they feel a natural, nurturing tendency to want to support and help build out curriculum or build out learning opportunities.
Kirby Rosplock
Now, there are more of the educator types, and I see a lot of consultants and coaches out there who are really great at sort of helping inspire and helping nurture a next gen family member or any family member for that point, but really don't have the technical expertise. So that's kind of where we wanted to map out. Where do you fit? Because one thing that I love about the tamarind learning platform we've created is that regardless of which quadrant, we can potentially be a supporting role, a lead role, or referred outsource partner to you. Now, the bottom left corner really doesn't have any information because you're not advising, you're not educating. So you could be anyone, right? Likely. You all fit in one of those quadrants if you're on this call today.
Torri Hawley
Yeah. And I want to emphasize as well that it's okay to be in any of these quadrants. There's no right or wrong way. It's having the tools to set your client up for success based on where they want you to be. Right. So if you have a client who's coming to you and they want you in that mentor role, having the self-awareness of saying, you know, I actually don't really do that, but I have the right resources to present you a learning plan or education that you need is really, really important, which is part of why we shared this. Right. We want our advisors to start thinking about what is my role in educating? Because we know that educating the next generation is so important for building that long term rapport.
Kirby Rosplock
This is a really cool slide Torri that you created. I think this is a great explanation of kind of the cycle. Right. That a lot of advisors go through when they're trying to figure out where to start, how to build comprehensive wealth education. Some firms actually do a lot of work to develop their own proprietary content. I think this is a double edged sword. I'm just going to call it out there, because sometimes if you also are selling product or pitching investments, your clients might say, hey, wait a minute, are you trying to influence and sell me more stuff or sell my family more stuff? And I think this is one of the hardest parts of how to get good education to families.
Torri Hawley
Yeah. And that comes to this idea of that high technical awareness. If you're an advisor and you're a CPA, you can deliver perhaps really great mentoring education around that one little piece. But if your client wants you to be in this box as a mentor around trust, tax, estate planning and these other topics that having the awareness is really hard. And we actually have one advisor who we work with who is an estate attorney. And they are like, I'm so good at this one piece that I almost have blinders on and I get so in the weeds on what I like to share or what I think they should know. And sometimes they just need this foundational knowledge to be empowered and engaged.
Kirby Rosplock
And I pretty much started at this point above, but again, I think more and more the amount of information that the human capital to really develop that is entailing is requiring advisors to find lots of different materials. So if their firm isn't providing it, then they have to go look outside. And then they're also conflicted with, oh, I don't want to show that competitor they have a great white paper, but maybe I don't want to put that to my client because maybe they're going to go look at that firm and not talk to me. So again, I think it's hard to find neutral material that isn't leading or potentially selling away from you.
Torri Hawley
Yeah. And another stumbling block that we see with advisors that we partner with on education is that gathering resources and building a curriculum on your own from the ground up. It's a full time job. You can hire a chief learning officer, you can hire someone for this role. But you as an advisor who's working day to day with your clients, they're going to ask you questions. We have one person that we partner with in particular who said, what we do is we go to a tangible bookshelf, we open up a book, and we find a chapter. We then photocopy that chapter, or we scan it in and we email it to our clients because it has the highlights that I know are really important. But if you're trying to scale this to a ton of different clients, it becomes a really big lift. And every interaction having to be bespoke. Learning is a big challenge for advisors.
Kirby Rosplock
Yeah. And let's just be honest. Sometimes advisors don't necessarily feel that they have the capacity, the time. I mean, when you start any sort of learning journey with a client, be it a whole family or an individual, it takes care and feeding and support, and that oftentimes means having a learning path and having milestones and checking in and having to really be present, not just push a lot of stuff their way. So if you're going to be an educator in the learning experience, be prepared for what that really entails and dedicating the time for that.
Torri Hawley
Right. And the last piece is, it's so important because, again, we know that education is integral to next gen rapport. Right. We know that this is one of the key areas that advisors can use to retain relationships. So then you get sort of forced back into this cycle. Okay, no, I have to be doing this. And that it can be segmented. It stops and Starts. It's stumbling. My client came back to me, and they want to approach education again and again. There's no wrong place to be in this. And this is just what we see with our advisors and their relationship prior to coming to tamarind learning, where we solve some of these issues.
Kirby Rosplock
Yeah. So I would say this slide is near and dear to my heart, because we hear a lot, 'Oh, my gosh, Kirby. There's so much resistance, or, what can we do to make this accessible?'. And again, I want you to consider the first point. Address resistance and manage fear that it's not a one and done try. Typically, learning doesn't happen because you say, are you ready to learn? And the client says, not today or maybe next month. It's a repeating. Like, we got to have lots and lots of attempts and continue to keep this forward in their mind, because, quite honestly, this is one of those things that people put off. It's like, I don't know. I think about when you're going to a big event and you want to look your best. Oftentimes people put off, like, starting their training and their workouts and everything else to feel their best self. And so sometimes it's hard because there's resistance. There's fear of what they don't know. There's fear of being judged. And so one thing I would say at the very beginning is to try to understand what are the impediments, what's truly getting in the way, and how can you start to address those real hurdles, those real barriers to learning and start to demystify and break them down?
Kirby Rosplock
And that's for the learner, but that's also for typically the elder generation who's saying, come on, they need to know this. And so sometimes it's really understanding. Is it their own insecurities? Is it their fear of being judged? Is it their fear of not matching up to their peers? Right. We have a lot of more and more people in our world that are neurodivergent, that learn differently. And so we really need to understand what those barriers or inhibitions are. And then let's also be cognizant that advisors oftentimes are asked to learn up with their clients in advance of a transition succession event, an aging out sort of retirement sort of situation. Sadly, I mean, I'm thinking, Torri, of a client we had who had a parent with a devastating illness, and they knew that there was going to be a death in the near term. And so, again, we really like to say that learning can happen at any point. There might be triggers like that. You're learning under duress. It's not ideal. It's never ideal to have to learn because your back is against the wall. And so we also use that as a motivator to say, hey, in advance.
Kirby Rosplock
We know this is going to happen maybe in five or ten years, but let's get prepared now, so when we're there, we won't have the stress of trying to learn to make the decisions, and then this provides safety nets to fail forward. So one of the things that I like to inculcate with advisors is think about the ability for smaller falls, less gravitational mistakes that won't necessarily have a dire impact on the family's reputation or the family's wealth or safety or security. So, again, I think it's so important that advisors also communicate the power of learning early, often, and opportunities for incremental or smaller kinds of opportunities for independence, autonomy. And if they make a mistake, that's okay. Help them support them through that, and help the elders support them through that. And the last one, identifying success teams is something I'm a big believer of. Whatever your learning curriculum, whatever your learning approach, find great role models that you can also surround the individual or the family with, who are three, five, or ten years ahead of where they think they want to get to, to model out how good hard work, good behavior can lead to great success.
Kirby Rosplock
And that's sometimes more inspiring than parents, than advisors. And we know that peers are the number one influencer in our young people and young adult lives. So that is a key piece to learning success, too.
Torri Hawley
Yeah. And something that we've seen with our clients is, in particular, one family said, this needs to be self governed. We want to educate the next generation, but it needs to be self governed. And that included creating success teams. Who are the spark plugs? Who are the people who are driving this? We're the people who are passionate about this, that family. Champion that piece. So family members can be part of a success team. Advisors can be part of a success team. There's a lot of opportunity to make this a broader group so that you're not putting all of this on your shoulders as an advisor as well. I'm going to jump in here and quickly cover our learning plan foundations. We've written an article about this, and we will share it after the webinar. But I wanted to bring attention, sort of our process for building learning plans with families. So you always, always want to start with the why. This is basic change management. Right. If we are asking a family to change their processes to make time for something, we have to have a pretty good reason why. If our why is, well, it's what we heard we should do.
Torri Hawley
Let's dig a little bit deeper into that. Why should we do it? Because we can look back at those stats and say, man, a few affluent millennials are feeling financial insecurity, and that's bad because then they make poor financial decisions or they're acting from a place of fear. So we want to be able to have a really clear why. We also want to identify the WIFM. WIFM is what's in it for me. As adult learners, we have so much on our plate that we need to address. So having a clear what's in it for you? And this can be intrinsic and extrinsic. Kirby and I did another webinar on this that we'd be happy to share with you as well, to talk through what that WIIFM means. The next piece is to create clear structures. What's the who, what, where, when? Why? How are learners learning? What are they learning? Where are they learning? So just really being articulate about these structures and who's doing what sets you up for success in a learning plan so that when something happens, a change occurs, you have a person to point to. And finally, after you've really laid this foundation, you can then start talking about curriculum.
Torri Hawley
Then once you have identified these pieces, you can start to say, okay, we're going to talk about financial literacy. Here's how we're going to do it. Here's the why we're doing it. Here's what's in it for you. If you complete that education. And here's the structures for that to happen, you'll see communication is the guiding point on top. All of these things require communication. You as an individual advisor, can't force this. Grandpa at the top can't force this. This has to be a process. So when everything is coming back to that why, though, it's your mission statement. So the WIIFM identified by the why, the structures identified by the why. And then finally, curriculum is identified by the why as well. We're going to spend these last few minutes here jumping into our personal education plan survey and our workbook. These are tools that we have built to sort of take this information that we've talked about, synthesize it into a document that you can either pass off to your clients and have them fill it out, or you can walk through it with them to sort of identify those pain points. And finally, we have a comprehensive wealth education assessment.
Torri Hawley
I'm not going to cover that today. We will share it out. It's 170 questions, really robust on sort of this learning bar. What should families be knowing about talking about in their education plans? Anything to add before I jump into sharing our PEP survey? Kirby?
Kirby Rosplock
Yeah, this is great. I just want to reiterate that we're really dedicated and committed to providing a lot of resources. These are all free tools that we provide that we hope help you advance your client further, farther, faster and also give you the confidence to actually start talking about these areas and issues in a way that really empowers you, working with your client and getting them to the right place.
Torri Hawley
Yeah, thanks for sharing that. And all of our resources are available on tamarindlearning.com. All of these are free to you guys. We have this fantastic wealth workbook as well. Fantastic podcast library, but we'll start with our PEP education plan and survey here. If you scroll down to the page, you can start, but we did queue up a little example so that we could talk through kind of this story of why you would create a learning plan and what it looks like for a family. So this family in particular, they're going through a generational transition. So this, we start to peel out their why. It becomes really clear if we don't do this, we're just going to go through the transition and we don't know what the outcome is going to be. So they have kids between ten and 15 years old and they're all going to be recipients of a trust. So they know they want to lay the good groundwork for what that means. But the adult generation here doesn't actually know what's going on themselves as well. So we have a really clear why. We want to get clarity. We want to move forward and we want to be prepared so that we can steward this wealth once dad transitions and works through this.
Torri Hawley
So the WIIFM, we said here, there needs to be a family discussion about this because the family is a little bit divided. Some family members want to get a vacation at the end and others want this to be the pathway for receiving a trust. And so they need to just have some conversations to solidify that WIIFM piece. And every family is going to do it a little bit differently. And so this survey we have built for families to go through again, either with your advisor or just as family members, and you have the ability to, once it's complete, to export it as a PDF or you can just save and continue later, you have your own unique link to it and it can become pretty durable as well. So we're figuring out those structures, right? That who, what, where, when, why? So who's being educated in this particular situation? We're talking about multigenerational, we're talking about parents and their children who in the next ten years or so are going to be in their 20s, who will do the educating. And so this person, we don't know yet. We're not quite there, but we want to keep that question in mind.
Torri Hawley
Who's going to be responsible for this?
Kirby Rosplock
I want to put a point on that, Torri. I think it's really important. When advisors are putting their toe in the water into this area, they may or may not be on the hook for education. So we make an assumption that advisors may want to know more and be more active or involved. But sometimes it's great if you can galvanize as part of the training and the progression of the learning bar in that family to empower a family owner to be the spark plug, to be the champion for learning and to help keep them accountable versus you the advisor having to be the watchdog.
Torri Hawley
Exactly. And that Kirby comes back to. Sometimes we learn better from our peers rather than, oh, particularly, oh, this is mom and Dad's person. This is Grandpa's person. They just want me to be educated for whatever reason. So being able to have that family Spark plug is a big piece of this. So all this is really just to start those discussions, have that communication. You now have a template for talking through those things. The next part of the survey is defining success, and so everyone should come out with basic financial skills. That's a common one, but being comfortable talking about the trust and the implications. So success is going to look different for every family. Maybe you have specific goals you want to meet. So this document is really just put in place to help families talk through these issues. And then the next portion is the knowledge and topic prioritization. So when you look at your family, here's a number of topics. These are all pulled from the tamarind learning curriculum and what we cover. What's the most urgent and what's the least important. So this person in particular said financial literacy is important.
Torri Hawley
Financial, parenting and budgeting, they're going through a liquidity event. They want to really start figuring that out, but they actually no longer have an operating business. So corporate tax is not super high on the priority list. And again, this gives you the opportunity to export this, to revisit it. You can change these answers at any time, and I won't spend too much time on these other topic areas. But again, all this is covered in the Tamarind Learning curriculum. And then we have an opportunity at the very end to sort of fill in the blanks on what else are you interested in? What else do you need to be having conversations around? And then we, of course, have a nice blank space. This person wanted to talk about vacation property management, a trust. So this doesn't have to be a static document. As things come up, feel free to come back to the survey and fill in more information. And before I switch over to the workbook portion of this, Kirby, did you have anything you wanted to add?
Kirby Rosplock
I think it's really important to recognize how to tee up this kind of resource, right. So there might be some nurturing conversations, and you might actually have multiple family members complete this. You might actually have other advisors connected to the family, with the family's permission, complete this as well. So just know that the responses go back to the individual who fills it out. So it really requires to know who's owning back to that, who's the spark plug and who's coordinating? Again, teeing up that assessment is a huge, empowering moment to get transparency and be prepared. There might be great stuff that's, oh, yeah, this is right on target. Or you might see a lot of blanks. I mean, sometimes family members cruise through this, and then that becomes another opportunity to say, hey, what's going on? Can we talk through why you didn't engage in this? And you might find a lot of other information that helps you understand resistance, fear or lack of engagement. So be prepared. And that assessment, again, could lead you in many directions.
Torri Hawley
Yeah, I love that you bring that up. And we have actually another tool called our wealth workbook that has an entire section on keep me awake at night. So maybe you start having a conversation about their pain points and their anxiety and their fear, and then you say, well, there's a solution to this, right? That a lot of this can be managed with the appropriate education, the right learning plan that meets your family needs, that's realistic, appropriate age, and stage appropriate as well. I have transitioned over to our personal education plan. We call it the Pep within Tamarind. And this is a workbook. And this workbook really helps you synthesize what that survey the results were. And we start with an outline of who our advisor team is. And Kirby, I was hoping you could just share a little bit about why it's important in a learning plan to know who your advisory team is. Yeah.
Kirby Rosplock
So the advisory team often knows who their client is. This is a clear relationship. You know exactly who you're serving, when, where and how. But it may not be as transparent or clear to the client. And I think it's really important. And we've segmented a personal team versus a family team. Why? Because we know when we've got a family and beneficiaries or next gen or minors that they're still under the sort of family team umbrella. But then let's fast forward to when they're in their twenty s and thirty s and they move out of state and they get different kinds of jobs, or they get married, and all of a sudden their lives start to take shape with other advisors that are in the picture. So maybe mom and Dad's estate planner is in one state, has done great planning for mom and dad, but now their son or daughter is in another state getting married or getting a new job or traveling overseas. And so then they're starting to get advice and advisors that aren't from their family of origin. So it could be one and the same, but maybe your parents have different investment advisors than you have, or maybe you have a different accountant than your family of origin.
Kirby Rosplock
So that's really the idea behind knowing who they are, what they do, how best to contact them, and what information they truly are experts in or have knowledge of.
Torri Hawley
Yeah. And another piece that, when you and I were talking through this, that's really important is maybe you don't know who some of these people are, and you should. So this really gives you a tangible exercise to kind of work through that question and just to think about it a little bit more, that maybe this is a blind spot for me and maybe I need some education around that as well. And coming back to this idea of, we want to be able to learn in ease rather than in duress. And so trying to figure out who your team is when a catastrophic event has happened or when you're really stressed or you have 500 people running around, that this is an easy way to have a durable document that you can come back to, and it really lays the foundation of something that you can return to as well and keep this top of mind. So we pulled out some learning objectives, and the way that we looked at this was actually taking those survey results and knowing that, for example, preparing for Dad's transition and trust going to the kids. We need to prepare their kids and ourselves and just to have a space to start working through.
Torri Hawley
What are some of the questions around that? Are we even going to be trustees? Should we vet out other trustees? Does dad even allow us to pick our trustees? Do I even know what a trustee does? So really to use this learning objective space to figure out what's top of mind in most priorities in a lot of families, it is that financial literacy, because that's the obvious place to start. But once you go through that survey piece, you can start to tease out a little bit more that, why? Why are we learning? What should we be getting out of this? So we have the opportunity to look through this as well and to use some space to write it out and think it out, which is the purpose of the workbook.
Kirby Rosplock
Torri, I know I'm seeing some stuff in the chat of questions coming in. We're going to address those at the end. But I also just wanted to bring up here that there are a lot of opportunities using the workbook to have meaningful conversations. So use this tool also to aid and give an excuse or a real poignant opportunity to have that intimate conversation with an elder or with a next gen family member to say, can we go deeper here from this objective that you filled out from the assessment. I just want to learn more what this looks like and why you put this in priority. And let's just talk about what that opportunity could be. So again, I think you're constantly peeling back the onion. You're using this to get higher fidelity around focus and interest and urgency. And that's sometimes what the survey won't give you as clarity. But when you hear that in somebody's voice or you see the waterworks and the tears start flowing, you start to know how much this is a priority or the fear around some of these areas too.
Torri Hawley
Right. And coming back to that idea of what inspiring advisors do, having the ability to address that resistance and fear, again, there's a pathway for this. There's education that we can put in place. So from those objectives, creating some pretty clear goals as well, wrapping your head around this liquidity event, creating a budget, being prepared to meet regularly with advisors. What do I need to do to be. And so just creating some really tangible stuff, getting the foundation of my estate plan started by the end of the year so we can really turn these actually into smart goals as well if we want to. With goal setting, the more specific we can be, the better, but also to acknowledge what are the learning challenges. So what we see with a lot of families is they are like, okay, I want to learn this, this, and this this year, but I have 1 hour in July to do it. So, okay, let's be realistic. What are our learning challenges? You're a full time parent. You're a full time worker. You have kids who are in school, so they're not going to have time. So this helps us inform that learning plan as well when we are realistic and acknowledging what the challenges are, so that we set ourselves up for success using this learning plan.
Torri Hawley
And that is the workbook. Again, we will send some resources out at the end. But the last piece of this is the actual education plan. So this was pulled from those survey results, all of the ones that were marked a five high importance or a four and put it into a plan. When do I want to learn about this? Well, I know that this transition event is going to happen in the next ten years. Maybe that's lower priority, but I know that stewarding wealth. We already have wealth. Let's start that conversation as the foundation. So it really gives you the opportunity to start to think about those more practical pieces so that you can put your plan into place now that you have some ideas. All right, so let's talk about what's next. You have all of this in place. You have your learning plan. So now, either as an advisor or as a family, you have to go out and develop, gather and find your curriculum. We will obviously advocate for ourselves here in this and that. We have a robust curriculum that covers stewardship, being a trust beneficiary, trustee basics, estate planning, trust and tax.
Torri Hawley
That we can take a lot of that lift off of advisors who are trying to accomplish being in that educator or mentor role or that referral role. Right? You don't have to go out and reinvent the wheel that we have something in place that manages a lot of these things that makes it easier for you to shine as an advisor. And finally, we're going to extend a special trial offer to everyone who is watching this webinar. So if you enroll in a trial by June 14, you will get one month of access to our entire stewardship course for free. So you have plenty of time to check it out, and then you can extend that to some colleagues or clients to join you in that trial period as well. We want to give you the opportunity to use our robust education tools. We have lots of resources out there. We would be more than happy to do a personalized site walkthrough to show you how to use the tools as an advisor or as a family to engage with your family members. And finally, we will help you complete a complimentary education assessment appointment as well, so we can help you get a handle on these tools to work through it with a family.
Torri Hawley
Is there anything else that we want to cover today, Kirby, before we get to answering any questions?
Kirby Rosplock
Yeah, the only thing I also just wanted to mention is that we have recently just done a major upgrade, and we have sort of a new, fresh dashboard that we've done a lot of testing, user testing and improvements on, thanks to so many of our wonderful clients already in our system. And so that is another reason if you've been in our site before, but haven't been in there in a while, it might be time to just take another fresh look, because we have some pretty cool new enhancements around functionality and different kinds of widgets to get you more information. So again, one thing we pride ourselves at Tamarind Learning is that our platform and our content is not static. It is dynamic, it's evolving and it's always improving. And so if you were here a month ago or six months ago, or a year or two ago, you really should jump back in, just for no other reason, to see how much has changed.
Torri Hawley
Perfect. Thanks so much, Kirby. And thanks everyone. We are going to be addressing questions. Now one of the questions I wanted to jump into right away was do you as the advisor, do the training with the client? And the answer is a little bit of a yes. And so the Tamarind learning curriculum is built to be very interactive and to be done asynchronously. However, we really see this come to life and see advisors shine when they are part of the conversation. They can provide support, guidance, mentoring around the curriculum. The curriculum also has tons and tons of built in activities that are great opportunity for advisors to jump in and do facilitation around it. As for how much content is psychosocial, we have two courses that specifically address some of those topics. So that would be the stewardship course and beneficiary fundamentals. However, throughout the coursework there's plenty of opportunities to make those psychosocial connections. One of the questions that we have too here is what if the family doesn't have a clear why? I think for families who want to learn just for the sake of learning, that can be their why. But then we're going to have to focus on other ways to engage them, keep them interested, and moving along an education plan.
Torri Hawley
So it is really helpful to define a reason why the family is educated. A lot of times families just like education.
Kirby Rosplock
Yeah, Kirby, I just would add that most often the advisor can have an insight to the why. You might know the markets are rocky and you want to make sure your client is knowledgeable about volatility and inflation or global geopolitics. So sometimes it may not be just to the family fact pattern. There might be other extraneous things going on in the world that you want to make it really important to say, hey, do you want to know what's happening in our banking industry and why we've had some consolidation and some banks go under? Well, this is why it's really important to know about these broader areas, just so that you're empowered, so you have a clear understanding of like this is when you need to ask questions and this is when you need to lean in. So I think it's really important to not miss the opportunities to show what you know about your client and why maybe more deeper knowledge is going to help them with your relationship and other relationships.
Torri Hawley
That's perfect. And we have just about 1 minute left here. There's a bunch of questions in the chat which we'll follow up with you directly if we didn't answer it. But in terms of good tips and insights on keeping a family engaged, we've done a whole other webinar I would encourage you go to our webinar page under resources and take a look at that. As for how much time it takes to work through the entire curriculum, which is the accredited beneficiary stewardship program, there's roughly 100 hours of content, and that doesn't include sort of the supplementary activities and other additional pieces. So we see people do this anywhere from six months to a year. If you wanted to do this together in a long weekend, I would recommend pulling out a couple of activities as an advisor from the curriculum and centering your weekend around that. Anything else before we jump off? Kirby, that's was great.
Kirby Rosplock
Thanks for everyone's patience and your attention today. And if you missed some of this or you want to share this with a colleague, we'll be giving the link out along with all the resources.
Torri Hawley
Thank you so much, everyone. Have a great day.
