The Importance of Collaboration While Building Wealth (and Why I Dragged My Financial Advisor into My CPA’s Office)

By Genhee So, WCI Columnist

As a doctor, I have always firmly understood that there are many moving parts to consider when delivering proper care to a patient. And as the daughter of a sick mother, the importance of cross-communication between medical fields became even more personal and palpable. In retrospect, what surprises me most about navigating (or, at times, fumbling through) my finances over the years is why I didn’t apply this professionally (and personally) acquired fundamental knowledge beyond the healthcare system to other aspects of my well-being—specifically, my financial health.

Just like the healthcare system, when there are so many moving parts to consider, sometimes the core principles that ensure smooth and efficient operations to build successful and sustainable wealth and retirement planning can be lost. The core commonly overlooked principle: effective and proper communication combined with an interdisciplinary approach to growing and protecting passive income.

When we think about our medical practices, we are trained to operate in collaborative environments. Communication breakdown, as one of the leading causes for litigation, highlights its importance. Yet when it comes to dealing with money and financial professionals, we often accept their usual practice in fragmented silos; our accountant working at their firm, the lawyer at their firm, and so on.

Over the years, through trial and error, I now believe that effective communication and interdisciplinary collaboration are vital to efficient wealth and retirement planning. A lesson learned the hard way: poor communication and suboptimal coordination between professionals can lead to tax leaks and growth inefficiencies in spite of working with the best professionals in their respective fields.

My Financial Pain (Tipping) Point: Who Is Handling My Chart?

Even if you have the most simplified of approaches when it comes to building sustaining wealth and passive income, decisions still have to be made about incorporation, retirement planning, practice transition, and estate planning—all of which are based on your personal family situation, your income, and your risk tolerance. And the majority of us still need an accountant, an insurance broker, a lawyer, and additional financial professionals to help build a sound and dynamic framework for our wealth. In this type of environment, who acts as the primary caregiver who facilitates the collaboration?

As someone who adopted a DIY financial strategy, one of the biggest pain points for me was having to be my own care coordinator—acting as the go-between among the financial professionals and struggling with understanding enough of their professional culture and language to apply to a different specialty. When you layer on different practices and turnaround times with respect to communication, it just adds unnecessary complexity to get the job done right.

Similar to being a patient advocate in the healthcare system for my mother, who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and as a radiologist participating in multidisciplinary rounds, I found it frustratingly difficult to navigate the healthcare system–despite being an active employee within that system for more than 15 years.

Trying to time appointments, results, and management treatment options between radiation and medical oncology departments, interventional radiologists, and my mom's family doc to ensure that she was getting the proper attention and quality patient care that she needed, I experienced that lack of cohesion. As a result, I discovered pitfalls within a complex system. They all operated in their own clinics and departments, and I was the inexperienced coordinator, trying to orchestrate a timeline of events to flow smoothly. It was a cumbersome and draining task, and I didn’t know how to execute it more efficiently.

Zooming out, I now understand that I failed to properly differentiate between a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approach to healthcare. In financial care, it’s no different: what I originally thought was an interdisciplinary approach between professionals was actually a financial team that was working individually and in parallel. I assumed that if I found the best professionals, then I would have the optimal structure in place to maximize and accelerate wealth generation. However, each of your team members working within their own offices and frameworks lacks integration when it comes to generating ideas, plans, and tax strategies that best care for you as their patient. And within this model, you (the patient) are an active participant and advocate for your own care, balancing the communication between each office—much like I was doing for my mother between all of her medical visits.

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Diagnostic Test I: Test for Lack of Understanding of Interdisciplinary vs. Multidisciplinary

In comparison, when participating in lung cancer multidisciplinary rounds as a radiologist, having myself, the pathologist, and the thoracic surgeon brought together in time and space with a unified focus on a single patient, the delivery of care is not only superior, but it's also more efficient than speaking to each of these physicians separately.

Despite its name, multidisciplinary rounds are actually very interdisciplinary in their practice, where there's coordination and organization for a shared treatment plan. Along with a petition to change the name, why was it measurably more successful?

After participating in these rounds, I noticed I could deliver greater value toward patient management and give the referrers a deeper understanding of the pathology involved. Also, how I analyzed the scans evolved—for example, knowing what relationships to anatomic pathology mattered to surgeons for their OR and what they considered irrelevant. The wording and content of my reports also changed to help better facilitate patient expectations and to avoid handcuffing physicians into additional testing if they felt it unnecessary.

Diagnostic Test II: Test for Poor Communication?

What I found most troubling was that even after being so well-versed in the principle as an effective treatment plan for patients, I never thought to expect the same fundamentals and level of care from the financial industry. Perhaps it's not the leading cause for litigation in finances, but there are many costs to poor communication when it comes to saving and investing effectively for your retirement. These missteps could naturally lead to inefficiencies and missed opportunities.

For example, I missed out on tax-deferral and additional tax-planning opportunities, and I had a lack of clarity, particularly when my accountant and my financial planner had conflicting comments when it came to particular financial products, like life insurance.

This lack of clarity came at a personal cost—heightening stress, anxiety, and the perpetuating feeling of non-confidence when it came to being on the right path and having the right plan in place to retire when I wanted. I also learned the hard way that there were some redundant strategies and overlap in my portfolio that were occurring because I had two financial advisors at different institutions—neither of which had insight into the big picture.

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The Rx: Communication and Collaboration

One of the best moves I made was fostering a collaborative environment between my professionals by bringing them together (my accountant and financial advisors) in person. Meeting in the same space was certainly met with resistance by my accountant originally, who shared the same skepticism of financial advisors that I had early in my career. But because we had a good relationship and he recognized my need, he was agreeable to discuss the pros and cons of a tax strategy that Canadian physicians were using at the time, known as a corporate surplus strip, where physicians could pull money from their corporation at a reduced tax rate.

By having these professionals together simultaneously, I could better understand their perspectives and their opinions. And if their opinions clashed or came into conflict, the discussion around why helped me become more confident in making better and informed decisions on how to proceed with a plan. I felt more in control of what was happening and also felt more confident that my retirement goals were on target and would be met.

Even if saving personal time was the only improved outcome for a busy physician, it would be totally worth it to promote conversation and an interdisciplinary approach.

There are additional benefits that improve outcome. That includes clarity for yourself and all parties involved. Plus, there are better brainstorming opportunities and ideas to create better tax efficiencies, where portfolios are built with future tax implications in mind as opposed to creating tax efficiencies after investment transactions have occurred.

Long-Term Care

To maintain a path of efficiency moving forward, finding those professionals who can and will collaborate is key and should be made easier in this technological age of online meeting platforms. Establishing this as a routine practice also helps manage expectations and can better organize time. If your professionals aren’t willing to collaborate with others, it may be an indication that their interests aren’t aligned with your best outcome.

But don’t be fooled—collaboration is not just sharing tax returns or income slips. The effectiveness of collaboration comes with being unified on a plan and executing a goal, not just trading documents to help complete the specified task in any professional role.

This unification of a shared goal (my health!) also naturally increased transparency and trust for all professionals on our team, which just helped us execute plans faster and allowed us to take advantage of time-sensitive opportunities when they presented themselves.

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Financial Remission

Just because society’s construct of the financial industry is compartmentalized, that doesn’t mean we have to practice it with these limitations. Suture up those tax leaks by avoiding compartmentalized advice in isolation, and promote accelerated growth with an interdisciplinary practice and mindset. By gathering all of your professionals together to discuss short-, mid-, and long-term goals, there are points of interest and opportunities that you may not have even known existed that could arise. Plus, it’ll return some personal time—which, for me, is enough to consider myself fully cured.

What do you think? Would it be possible to gather your financial team into one combined meeting? What would be the benefits of that?