Hurricane Harvey: Helping Clients After the Clouds Clear
August 27, 2017
As Hurricane Harvey bore down on the Texas coastline last week, adviser Liz Miller and her colleagues at Summit Place Financial Advisors in Summit, New Jersey, immediately began calling clients who might be affected.
“We reached out proactively to clients in the area checking if they had left and offering help if we could,” says Miller. With continued rain and flooding expected over the next few days, she says her firm will continue to “reach out and see how we can help.”
Unfortunately, she has had to make similar calls before. Last October, she and her colleagues rushed to offer financial advice and emotional support to clients who were in the path of Hurricane Matthew which slammed the Florida coast and left more than a million people without power.
Fortunately for Miller’s clients, she’d prepped them long before the hurricane.
“Over the past couple years we have encouraged every client and friend of the firm to complete a critical information organizer that we provide to record contacts and locations of important documents,” she says. “We also offer to scan and post estate planning, insurance and other important documents to the secure vault on our clients’ personalized firm websites.”
Before other storms, Summit Financial has helped clients procure flood and earthquake insurance. They’ve also suggested they allocate cash to be held at a local community bank or an out-of-town bank, in case evacuation was needed.
“Money is the last thing you want to worry about when facing a potential natural disaster,” she said in October.
This interview with Liz Miller originally appeared on Financial Planning.com. Click here to read the full article.