Barry LaValley

LaValley: Providing valuable retirement advice

Blog Polls Have your say in our forum . Not long ago, I was making a presentation on the role of a retirement advisor to a group of financial planners. In my audience were advisors with a wide range of academic credentials and experience. Our discussion focused on what a retirement advisor was supposed to […]

By Barry LaValley |February 25, 2010

6 min read

Planning and Advice

LaValley: Understanding how clients think and act

Regular readers of this space know that people don’t always behave rationally or respond to logic because of the overriding influence that emotion has on how we think and act. It is the emotional intangibles that make communication more complex than it needs to be. If our brains operated as simple calculators producing results based […]

By Barry LaValley |January 11, 2010

6 min read

Planning and Advice

What we can learn from brain science

We have all heard variations of the new shoe salesman story. The young salesman was frustrated because he wasn’t selling very many pairs of shoes. “I don’t know what I am doing wrong”, he lamented to an older colleague after a particularly frustrating day. “I must have served fifty different people today who all looked […]

By Barry LaValley |December 9, 2009

5 min read