A new Journal of Financial Planning paper asks how clients place themselves among 'the wealthy'

Every advisor segmentation model starts with a number: investable assets, household net worth, the threshold that decides which service tier a client lands in. A new exploratory paper in the Journal of Financial Planning starts with the category the client claims instead, and with the possibility that how a person places themselves relative to "the wealthy" shapes investment beliefs and behavior in ways a balance sheet does not capture.

The paper, "An Exploratory Study of the Wealthy's Investment Beliefs, Preferences, and Behaviors," is by Matthew Sommer, who holds a doctorate along with the CFA and CFP marks and leads behavioral finance research at Janus Henderson, and Sonya Lutter, a CFP and licensed marriage and family therapist who serves as the inaugural director of financial health and wellness at Texas Tech University's School of Financial Planning. Their framing rests on social categorization research attributed to Hogg (2016): people sort themselves and others into in-groups and out-groups, and once placed in a group, the alliance between members stays clear even where personal attachment to the broader group runs thin. Someone who views themselves as non-wealthy, on that logic, lines up with other non-wealthy people and reads the wealthy as a competing group, and those perceived differences carry weight while the actual differences in investment beliefs, preferences and behaviors across wealth levels remain thinly documented.

The documentation gap gives the paper its practical edge, because North America held 7.4 million high-net-worth individuals and $25.6 trillion in investable assets as of 2022, according to Capgemini figures the paper cites, a pool every advisory firm wants a claim on and one the paper concedes requires "a specific skill set and expertise." What that skill set consists of is where the paper turns practical: advisors who excel in the segment, it argues, create a differentiated experience built around each client's unique needs and expectations, pairing technical command with clear communication and the ability to earn trust from family members and outside advisers as well as from the client. The authors tie that last point to recent market and geopolitical uncertainty, which raises the cost of service that feels routine.

The version of the paper available here runs out inside its statement of purpose, before any findings, so the study's read on wealthy and affluent clients is not yet on the record and anything asserted about it beyond the framing would be invention. What the framing gives an advisor is a testable proposition, because assets are the default segmentation variable for a reason: they are observable, comparable across the book and tied directly to pricing and service tiers. Self-categorization is none of those things: it does not appear on a custodian statement, it does not survive a sort in most CRM systems, but it does surface in language. A client who says "we're comfortable" and a client with an identical balance sheet who says "we're not rich" are describing two different relationships to the money, and the second is telling you which group they place themselves in.

If self-identification drives affiliation, the referral map changes shape. A firm that mines its wealthiest households for introductions to other wealthy households works from the assumption that wealth is the shared category, but the paper's premise suggests the shared category may be whatever the client believes they are—a profession, a community, a stage of life—and that the introduction a client is actually willing to make runs along that line rather than the asset line. The test costs nothing: ask your best clients who they compared themselves to when they decided to hire you, and which of their acquaintances they would describe as being in the same position they are. The answers amount to a segmentation study of your own book, and they will either support the paper's premise or quietly bury it.

The service argument is the part advisors can act on today, findings or no findings, and it puts the segment's demands in three parts—technical expertise, communication that lands, and trust that reaches family members and outside advisers—which is a description of a team rather than of a solo practitioner's calendar. The relationship with a client's CPA and attorney is where the outside-adviser piece gets decided, and it is the piece most easily neglected during a drawdown, exactly when the authors say service quality matters most. The paper locates its subject inside the CFP Board's principal knowledge topic on psychology, as the available text has it, which places the group-categorization question in the planner's lane rather than at its edge.

A Journal of Financial Planning paper this publication covered recently inventoried what planners deliver, and we argued the inventory is a stronger client conversation than any performance comparison. The CFP Board's rollover framework, covered here this year, points the same way: the written, client-specific analysis beats the general pitch. Both are reminders that the advisor's edge in this segment lives in articulation, and a study of how wealthy clients see themselves is ultimately a study of the language they will respond to.

Until the paper's results land, the experiment is cheap to run in your own book: ask clients who they compare themselves to, and listen for the group they put themselves in. Whether that answer predicts anything about their investment behavior is still open—and the paper that set out to test it has not yet said.