A vacation home is a clue, not the goal

A client mentions a vacation home. An advisor can start building a cash-flow projection for a second property, or can pause and ask what the property would actually make possible. On episode 197 of Kitces & Carl, the Nerd's Eye View podcast, Michael Kitces and Carl Richards argue that a stated want like a vacation home is a clue to something underneath, not the goal itself. The advisor's work is to find what sits underneath before a single assumption goes into a plan.

Many of these decisions are expensive in ways that never appear on a statement, the hosts note. They consume cash, time, and attention that could go elsewhere. What a client wants may have roots in connection, community, independence, or purpose, and those motivations rarely come out of a client's mouth directly. Kitces and Richards reach for a simple prompt: "What would having that allow you to do?" The answer carries the actual desire; only then do the options get weighed.

The conversation is not a one-time discovery meeting. The value of planning, Kitces and Richards say, is often in helping clients realize their goals — literally, by managing cash flow, and figuratively, by determining what those goals actually are. The first is a matter of good planning; the second calls for continual time and investigation. That framing keeps client interviews on the calendar for the life of the relationship, not as an onboarding checkbox.

Then the testing starts. The episode's core suggestion is to try small, deliberate experiments instead of large, irreversible commitments. Rent a similar property in the area the client has in mind. Serve as a one-time volunteer before taking a long-term role. Each experiment answers a question: what the client actually enjoys, what sacrifices they are willing to make, whether the experience delivers what it promised.

A failed test is a cheap answer. The client who rents the property for a season learns whether the fantasy survives ordinary Tuesday nights. The one-time volunteer learns whether community work replenishes or drains. Both conclusions arrive before money and time have been committed to a purchase or a board seat. That is why the exercise belongs early in the planning relationship.

For clients stuck between two paths, Kitces and Richards propose a forward projection. Imagine that it is three years from now and the aspiration has been achieved. What does the life look like? How does it feel? The description usually carries implicit excitement for one direction over another, which tells the advisor where to point the next small step. The hosts say the exercise is most useful when a client is otherwise at a standstill.

Discovery, in this framing, is not an intake form. The hosts argue that a person's life is made up of where money, time, and attention go, and the planning conversation is where those choices get examined. The uncomfortable implication for advisors is that projection models are the easy half. The ongoing work of finding out why a client wants what she wants is the part that compounds.

Hold the conversation consistently, and clients may end up surprised at what actually makes a difference to them. The value of financial planning, the episode concludes, accumulates in those large and small commitments over time. For a firm, that is a defensible reason to keep discovery on the calendar for every review — and to treat the vacation-home conversation as the start of the work, not a detour from it.