Yeske Buie and the Financial Planning Association

If you were to peruse the Our Team section of the Yeske Buie website, you would find various mentions of the Financial Planning Association^® (FPA^®) in the biographies of all of our Financial Planning Team. For example:

• Elissa played a significant role in merging the Institute of Certified Financial Planners (ICFP) and the International Association for Financial Planning (IAFP) to form the Financial Planning Association. She is a past Chair of the Financial Planning Association (US) and is a Dean for the FPA’s Residency Program. Elissa was the 2013 recipient of FPA’s P. Kemp Fain, Jr. Award, the highest honor possible in the financial planning profession.
• Dave is a past Chair of the Financial Planning Association (US) and received FPA’s Heart of Financial Planning award in 2012. He is also a long-time Mentor in FPA’s Residency Program and currently serves as practitioner editor of FPA’s Journal of Financial Planning. Dave was the 2017 recipient of FPA’s P. Kemp Fain, Jr. Award, the highest honor possible in the financial planning profession.

• Yusuf has served on the Financial Planning Day and Career Day committees through FPA’s National Capital Area chapter and has also served on the chapter’s board as the Director of PR, Media Relations and Communications. Yusuf is a member of FPA’s NexGen community and is a graduate of FPA’s Residency Program.
• Lauren co-founded the Financial Planning Association (FPA) Student Chapter at Virginia Tech and was the first president of the organization. She served as the Co-Director of NexGen for the FPA of the National Capital Area and is currently the 2019 President-Elect of the FPA of San Francisco. Lauren is also a graduate of FPA’s Residency Program and had the honor of serving as a Mentor to the Residents at the June 2019 Residency Program. She is looking forward to serving as a mentor again in June 2020.

In this space, we share more about the Financial Planning Association including insights about the importance of the organization and Yeske Buie’s commitment to being involved with the FPA community.

What is the Financial Planning Association?

FPA is a membership organization that serves as the principal professional organization for CFP professionals, educators, financial services providers and students who seek advancement in a growing, dynamic profession. The FPA is different from the CFP Board, which is the non-profit certifying body which fosters “professional standards in personal financial planning through its setting and enforcement of the education, examination, experience, ethics and other requirements for CFP^® certifications.”

Although these are separate entities, their world views converge on the common ground of ethics and the practice of financial planning to change lives. Because Yeske Buie identifies closely with the FPA’s core values of Competence, Integrity, Relationships, and Stewardship and their Standard of Care, we have always worked closely with the FPA to share a collaborative world view with the belief that educating passionate individuals is one of the best ways to extend the reach of financial planning best practices.

So, why does Yeske Buie have such a connection to the organization?

Dave and Elissa often quote financial planning visionary Dick Wagner and say that money is the most powerful secular force in on Earth, a statement proven over and over again by the various studies illustrating its impact on relationships and quality of life (not to be confused with happiness). But what do we do with these statistics? How do we effectively share our knowledge to help those in need? Where would we be without the collaborative learning experience? In What Technology Wants, Kevin Kelly explains the value that the advancement of collaborative learning had on the life span and overall trajectory of the human race:

“Imagine a society that not only lacked grandparents but also lacked language – as the pre-Sapiens did. How would learning be transmitted over generations? Your own parents would die before you were an adult, and in any case, they could not communicate to you anything beyond what they could show you while you were immature. You would certainly not learn anything from anyone outside your immediate circle of peers. Innovation and cultural learning would cease to flow.”

Once humans established a formal platform or entity to gather and disseminate information, we refined our values, tools, and techniques in an effort to make the world a better place. As with many professions, financial planning would not be what it is today without the contributions of its pioneers, like Lynn Hopewell, and professional organizations – such as the Financial Planning Association (FPA).

The FPA offers the profession a unified platform through which practitioners can increase their competence to foster client relationships with the shared benefit of mutual success. Yeske Buie takes full advantage of these opportunities through participating in FPA collegiate chapter events by encouraging and educating the future leaders of the profession, sending staff to FPA Residency (an event where Dave and Elissa often serve as mentors for young Financial Planners in a week long intensive retreat), local chapter events, and regional/national conferences; after which, those in attendance share what they learned with the entire staff so that we are all serving Clients with the best available wisdom. At these events top minds in the profession present on their knowledge, experience, and research to empower advisors to best serve their clients. But it is not enough to attend, hear, and know – the financial planning profession as whole has continued embrace the collaborative learning style to better help our clients achieve their goals.

Just as advisors do when providing financial advice to a client, the FPA has helped the profession not by planning the future by looking at the past to move forward, but by identifying the future that the world needs and moving backwards to build a foundation of Competence, Integrity, Relationships, and Stewardship. Not a profession of transactions and statistics, but one of values and purpose that can be achieved/derived from smart Financial Planning Policies. Perhaps Kofi Annan, 7^th Secretary-General for the United Nations and co-recipient of the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize, said it best “Knowledge is power. Information is liberating. Education is the premise of progress, in every society, in every family.”