It is essential that both you and your parents are on the same page when it comes to hiring a financial advisor. Simply sharing my firm's website with them may not be enough if they are not as concerned about the issue. To ensure that they end up hiring me, it is important to stay engaged and present during the initial consultation process until they become ongoing clients.

The initial consultation is an involved process and does require your parents to prepare the necessary documents for me to review prior to receiving the final recommendations. If the requested financial documents are not provided 3 days prior to the recommendation meeting, we will have to reschedule to allow enough time to review the documents and prepare recommendations.

This is similar to what I had to do with my parents in order to get them to create their estate planning documents, including trust, will, healthcare POA, financial POA, and health care directive. I discussed with them of the importance of getting it done for over a year and when they were finally ready, I scheduled a meeting with an attorney I worked with before and finally completed the work.

Sometimes it just takes time. It took over two years from when I realized my aging parents did not have any estate planning done to finally signing the new documents. They wanted to get it done but just didn’t have an attorney in mind. I set up all of the meetings with my own estate planning attorney and attended all the meetings with my parents. The attorney I hired didn’t speak Chinese so I acted as my father’s translator as well, something you do not have to worry about when I help your parents.

You can share my video gallery and use the language filter to find the financial education videos I create in English, Cantonese, and Mandarin. All blog posts are written in English, Traditional Chinese, and Simplified Chinese.

Absolutely. I created the “Meet a Friend” meeting just so we can connect together before you involved your parents. We can discuss most anything so you can get to know me on a personal and professional level. Learn more about scheduling that meeting by clicking here.

Yes and no. It all comes down to who has the sense of urgency.

You may recognize the need for your parents to invest in a balanced portfolio of low cost stock and bond funds and to work with a fiduciary to implement but they might not.

In this case, it is best to stay involved throughout the discovery, recommendation, and implementation process to make sure to bring your parents through the finish line.

After they have established a working relationship with Co Planning Group, then your need for involvement goes down significantly. You may choose to stay as involved as long as you and your parents agree on it.

Just simply sharing my company’s website with your parents likely won’t lead to a productive outcome.

Yes. Everything we do for our clients can be done remotely. I use Zoom to conduct virtual meetings and HelloSign to complete any signatures necessary.

My Mandarin and Cantonese are never as good as my parents and in-laws would like it to be but I do speak Mandarin daily with my wife and Cantonese frequently with my father.

When working with children of immigrants to help their parents, the meetings will bounce back and forth between Cantonese/Mandarin and English. I am comfortable with switching between these languages.

If you do not speak or understand Mandarin/Cantonese fluently, I sympathize with you since you probably grew up with your parents constantly nagging you to practice your Mandarin/Cantonese. This was something I had to deal with as well when my Cantonese and Mandarin continued to deteriorate the longer I grew up in the Midwest.

With written consent from your parents, I can email your parent’s account statements to you to stay in the loop. If you do not wish to know the amount of money they have, I can simply discuss the performance in terms of percentages over phone, as long as written consent from your parents is provided.

Throughout my career, I have served the broad American population. I finally had an opportunity to also work with Chinese immigrants as a small part of my work when I was employed at TD Ameritrade Investment Management (TDAIM).

From my work at TDAIM, I found that my unique combination of CFP® training, language skills, and cultural background means that I am most indispensable for Cantonese or Mandarin speaking immigrants who wish to find a trustworthy financial planner they could relate and speak authentically to.

Due to the language barrier, many Chinese immigrants find it difficult to filter through the good, bad, and ugly of the financial industry and often fall prey to financial scams or are sold investment and insurance products they don’t truly understand by people within their own community they thought they could trust.

I aim to change that by creating a Registered Investment Advisory firm that has the legal duty to always act in their best interest.

At this moment, I only work with US citizens or green card holders.