There are an almost infinite number of details that you can work on when planning to establish your own business as an independent financial advisor. But I want to outline those critical few things that you absolutely must have when you make the move. In particular, I’m focused on the first ninety days of your new practice.
If you’re working in employee model (at a wirehouse etc)-- here is the sixth thing I think you need to think about (mostly in order) to set up your own practice.
If you would rather listen to this in audio, you can also listen to the entire list in episode 26 of our podcast by clicking HERE.
6) A Computer
You need a COMPUTER -- another obvious item, but I want to mention it anyway. You can decide if you want a desktop or a laptop, there's benefits and drawbacks to each. I won't go to that in detail -- in this form I might do another episode at some point on all the technology decisions there are to make and some of the pros and cons of each.
I tend to be pretty frugal especially when I started the practice (almost) seven years ago now, I didn't spend much -- I just got kind of got what I needed to do business, the way technology moves I would try to get something that's not the basics like I did in the beginning and go maybe two rungs up from there even if you're fairly frugal just to future-proof your business a little bit.
As of the middle of 2016, for a Windows machine I think you need at least an i5 processor or chip whatever the computer lingo is, I need that kind of processor to do the amount of web browsing I wanna do and have a bunch of tabs open so it wouldn't find a lot of effort to find an expert even at a retail store like a best buy and just say "hey, here's what I need to do, what kind of machine do you recommend?" And there's no reason for most of us, if you're buying a laptop (or desktop) you shouldn't have to spend more than a thousand dollars to get a solid laptop.
Now if you wanna have higher powered graphics -- and really that's only if you're using video or doing video games -- for some reason would you need a higher-end machine but again that's personal preference. I would just be cautious -- if you go to the low-end be careful don't pick the lowest end machine because that can slow you down and again as one who likes to be frugal, especially when I started the practice at a caution, served me well but I've definitely benefitted from upgrading the last few years.