I’ve heard it estimated that out of all the financial and estate planning recommendations that advisers make, their clients ignore more than 80% of them. If there’s even a shred of truth in this stat, it represents a monumental failure of the financial advice industry.

To explain why, let me tell you a story about a financial planning client I worked with a few years back. In one of our first meetings, she and I were reviewing her three most recent tax returns. As I discussed them with her, it became clear that the accountant who had prepared those returns — an accountant who had been recommended to her by her father — had filled them out fraudulently. A bag of old clothes that she had donated to charity became, on her Schedule A, a $10,500 cash gift. She also deducted work expenses for which she had already been reimbursed.