Journal of Financial Planning: August 2025
Mike Zarrelli, CFP®, EA, is a financial adviser helping clients enjoy their wealth today and tomorrow. He creates educational content on LinkedIn and volunteers with FPA NexGen. He works at FSA Wealth Partners (https://fsawealthpartners.com) and can be reached at linkedin.com/in/mike-zarrelli-cfp-ea.
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Have you ever read a professional development book that really resonated with you, but months later, you can’t recall a single actionable takeaway? Yeah, me too . . . all the time!
We live in a world where so much information is at our fingertips. It’s never been easier for advisers to grow their expertise and enhance the client experience, but it’s also never been easier to get overwhelmed by the sheer volume of content.
This can be especially true for younger advisers who haven’t quite “made it” yet. Starting a financial planning career can feel like stepping onto the field without a playbook. You may have a base level of technical knowledge, have passed the CFP® exam, and even have a few client meetings under your belt. But confidently delivering advice, building rapport, and developing your own voice? That takes more than textbook knowledge. That takes a financial planning playbook.
Or, as some might call it, a second brain. This idea was popularized by Tiago Forte, a leading expert in productivity, digital organization, and personal knowledge management, in his book Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential.
A financial planning playbook is your personal hub of ideas, quotes, mental models, and communication frameworks you gather over time. It’s the space where you store what resonates with you and where your professional identity starts to take shape. It’s how you actually extract value from all the media you consume.
Creating Space for Your Second Brain
There are plenty of tools you can use to build your second brain, from the Notes app on your iPhone to more complex programs like Notion. Personally, I’ve found that a simple Google Doc works great, especially since you can organize it with headings, tabs, and sub-tabs. OneNote is another solid option.
Once you’ve chosen your note-taking tool, the next step is to break it into sections. This makes it easier to manage your ideas and quickly find what you need when it’s time to reference them. That way, your ideas stay clean, clear, and easy to find.
For example, in my playbook, I have tabs for:
- Financial planning beliefs
- Productivity hacks
- Communication frameworks
- Phrases and scripts to use with clients
This is totally customizable based on your interests and personality.
Filling Your Financial Planning Playbook
Now that you’ve created your playbook, it’s time to start filling it in.
Start with the obvious: books, articles, and webinars. You might log insights about tax-efficient withdrawal strategies in retirement, behavioral finance techniques, or, of course, links to your favorite Kitces articles. These foundational ideas are important, but they’re only the beginning.
Then there are the creative places to draw inspiration from:
- Have you noticed your lead advisers using the same analogy or phrase over and over in client meetings? If it resonates with you, that’s a great example of something to write down.
- Have you gone down an X (formerly Twitter) thread with advisers sharing examples of their one-page financial plans? Save it to your idea vault.
- Love a quote from a song that gives you energy? Add that in too!
You’re essentially creating a hub to house anything and everything that can help you become a better adviser. To show what this might look like, below are a handful of examples of content I’ve added to my idea vault:
- Kitces Article: “Three Essential Meeting Skills for Financial Advisors”
- Brian Feroldi’s 50 Visuals Every Investor Should Memorize
- “The 4-Step Framework to Guide Anxious Clients Through Uncertain Markets” from the Human Side of Money podcast
- Communication frameworks from the book Think Faster, Talk Smarter
- A quote from an adviser at my firm: “You need time, will, and skill to invest on your own. Missing any one of the three could lead to poor investing outcomes.”
- How the founder of our firm explains market movements to clients: “Markets are like staircases. They have periods of steps moving up and down, and sometimes there are landings where we stay put, waiting for the next phase of the staircase.”
- A lyric from the song “Learn to Lose” by Bakermat: “If you wanna be a winner, you gotta learn to lose.”
As your library of content grows, you may want to take it a step forward by creating outlines or scripts for key client interactions. For example, you could map out your approach to annual reviews, scary market discussions, or how to ask for referrals.
Filling Your Financial Planning Playbook: Planning Beliefs
“Financial planning beliefs” is a vague term, which is exactly why it deserves its own section. Unsurprisingly, this tab in my playbook is broken down further by topic, such as investments, psychology of financial planning, estate planning, etc. A few examples of the beliefs I’ve written down include:
- Investment philosophy. My investment philosophy relies on a high savings rate, patience, and optimism. I believe clients are better served by focusing on what they can control, like their savings rate, burn rate, recession-proofing their finances, and enjoying life, rather than the things they can’t control like market returns.
- The investment buckets framework. This framework assigns jobs to your money, whether that’s covering emergencies, giving your future self more flexibility, or growing long-term wealth. Once money has a job, it becomes easier to match it with the right level of risk and return.
- Behavioral finance. To help clients avoid common behavioral pitfalls (like selling in a downturn), I like the “barbell” approach to finances. On one side, build conservative personal finances: a strong emergency fund, manageable low-interest debt, and solid savings habits. On the other side, this allows you to stick with a more aggressive long-term investment strategy and be ready to take advantage of opportunities as they come.
- Estate planning. When it comes to estate planning, there is a difference between being fair and being equal. So, when helping clients think about their legacy, explore how they want the inheritance to flow—equally, fairly, or somewhere in between.
Writing down these types of core beliefs helps reinforce what’s important to me as an adviser and the lessons I hope clients will carry with them to better navigate the uncertainty of the future. Of course, beliefs evolve as you gain more experience and encounter new ideas. Taking the time to plant those early stakes in the ground is what builds confidence and helps you move from associate to lead adviser.
I also recommend adding a sub-tab to this section for brainstorming your own firm. Even if you don’t plan to go independent, this kind of exercise helps you start thinking like an entrepreneur. It shifts your mindset and can spark ideas for improving your current firm in areas like marketing, internal processes, and client experience.
In this creative space, you can explore possible firm names, niches, financial planning processes, marketing strategies, billing philosophy (AUM versus subscription fees), and more. You can also save links to articles and tools that match your authentic working style. Here’s a sample of what’s in my “Launching My Firm” tab:
- Kitces articles like “Creating Client Service Calendars That Demonstrate Ongoing Advisor Value” and “Increasing Financial Planning Efficiency With A Systematized Annual Process”
- Software I would like to use (RightCapital, Holistiplan, Elements, etc.)
- A rough draft of my financial planning process, complete with scripts and questions for each step
Most financial advisers are, by nature, wired as either entrepreneurs or intrapreneurs. Adopting this kind of “CEO thinking” will pay dividends whether you’re aiming to become a partner or planning to build something of your own.
I’ve experienced the benefits of this firsthand. Earlier this year, my firm wanted to implement a formal financial planning process, something we could showcase on our website, and integrate a systematized workflow into our CRM. Because I had already put in the work to build my own version, I was well-equipped to lead the project. I had notes going back to 2021, and those notes paid dividends four years later.
That’s the essence of the playbook. It’s not just for today. It’s a tool for the long game. Your career is a marathon, not a sprint.
You’ve Got Your Playbook, Now What!?
Reading and taking notes is one form of comprehension, but that doesn’t guarantee the information will stick, especially in the middle of a conversation with a client. In fact, collecting ideas, quotes, and frameworks is just the beginning . . . you need to revisit them often and, more importantly, test drive using them.
Putting your notes into practice solidifies your beliefs and sharpens your delivery. This is what ultimately will boost your confidence when speaking with clients. That’s why it’s so important to reread your playbook regularly and practice using it. Rehearse your advice in the mirror, with a colleague, or your significant other, or test drive it with your manager. You can even record yourself explaining what you do for a living (as if you are at a networking event) or walking a client through the benefits of a Roth conversion. Rep after rep, you’ll start to see the information flow naturally.
If you’re working on implementing the scripts, be especially careful. Reading scripts is not the best way to build trust with clients. You need to practice your delivery and style behind the scenes before using it in front of others. Early on, you may want to keep the outline up during those calls until it becomes second nature. That’s the goal!
The Playbook Payoff
In my experience, there are three distinct stages to launching a financial planning career:
- Phase 1—Solidifying your financial planning knowledge and earning the CFP® designation
- Phase 2—Building confidence in presenting financial plans and building rapport with clients
- Phase 3—Developing your own unique style as a financial planner
Your financial planning playbook becomes extremely valuable in Phase 3. By capturing what resonates, revisiting it often, and putting it into practice, you’ll start to see your approach to personal finance take shape.
Confidence isn’t something you suddenly wake up with one day. It’s like that iceberg graphic that Kitces shares on LinkedIn all the time. Building success comes from everything happening below the surface. You eliminate imposter syndrome by doing the foundational work and rehearsing your delivery until it becomes second nature. At that point, you no longer just know the material, you own it!
So, get started. Fill your playbook. Practice out loud. And watch your confidence, competence, and client relationships grow stronger with every rep.