Everything old is new again, and millennials are the new baby boomers. It’s all about them. It’s about what they do. It’s about what we want them to do.

Perhaps the best way to reach millennials is to follow the lead of a millennial. Tara Falcone offers a great example.

After suffering a terrible tragedy as a youngster, she was thrust into the economic reality of everyday financial decisions before she graduated from high school.

Following her graduation from Yale, she did an aboutface from her pre-med studies and decided to use her real-world education to help her classmates and friends face the financial realities she knew their formal schooling never trained them for. If you want to know how to talk to a millennial, you must first listen to a millennial (see “Exclusive Interview with Tara Falcone: How to Talk Financial to Millennials,” FiduciaryNews.com, November 15, 2016).

We all know if high schools and colleges made financial literacy a requirement for education, we’d be an “uneducated” nation of non-graduates. This applies to all schools, including the esteemed Ivy League.

We also know, if graduates a generation or two ago possessed a smidgeon of financial literacy, they’d all be looking forward to a retirement awash with barrels of money. This isn’t because they’d have started their own businesses, but because they would have known the power of time.

They would have known to maximize their retirement savings immediately upon entering the workforce (if not before – see The Child IRA).

Falcone can’t emphasize this enough. She’s been producing financial literacy videos for millennials. In the process, besides honing both the message and the content delivery for optimal engagement with the audience, she takes every opportunity to trumpet the glory that is compounding.

She realized long ago the greatest advantage offered to the young is time. Many of us have to wait until we’re much older to see this.

So, what’s the secret to convincing millennials to realize the potential value of time? Simple, just listen to them.

Millennials don’t want advice. They want to do it themselves.

So let them. Enable them. Guide them. But don’t lecture them. Don’t tell them what to do. They need to make their own mistakes.

Perhaps the best we could hope for is to nudge them towards mistakes with lower downside risk. Nonetheless, only then can decide when the greatest knowledge they could have is to realize they don’t possess the knowledge they think they do.

Remember what it was like when you were young: You never thought of time as a limited resource. Indeed, you probably considered it a never-ending fountain.

You could easily justify putting off until tomorrow so you could immerse yourself in the joys of today. Then, just as soon as you thought those joys would last forever, you find yourself under pressure to add more value at work, buying (and paying for) a new home as a result of that sweet budding romance, and, finally, experiencing the wear and tear of children. Now you’re looking forward to tomorrow for relief, but still you’re too busy to do anything more.

But you know you must do more. You just don’t trust anyone. And you think you can do it yourself. So you ask questions.

According to Falcone, other than “What is a fiduciary?” millennials want to know more about employer matching (free money) and whether to use a traditional retirement plan or a Roth (deferring taxes today vs. eliminating taxes forever).

You might think these questions represent the crack in the door that allows you to sneak into the financial lives of millennials. But don’t think of this exercise as a deception – millennials will be on to you quicker than you think. Consider it a service. A chance to listen. And learn.

If there’s one thing the Trump victory teaches us, it’s to listen to the silence in others. Millennials may be giving the financial industry the silent treatment, but that doesn’t mean they don’t want to talk.

The challenge of the adviser is to find the opportunity to begin the discussion, hopefully before the job starts to become a career, before mortgage payments start, and before the nursery has an occupant. Then it becomes a game of jujitsu.

Millennials aren’t the first generation to find glory in the splendor of instant gratification, but it seems to strike a chord, so use it to your advantage. And listen. And get them to teach you, rather than you teaching them. They won’t listen to you until you learn from them.*

*Surprise, this applies to all generations, not just millennials.

Instant Insights /

Millennials must strike balance between today and tomorrow

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