Image via CrunchBase

Financial advisors often describe themselves as investment counselors, financial planners, client advocates and asset gatherers. Yet, many advisors neglect to describe themselves as communicators, which may be a crucial mistake.

At first blush, the retirement planning industry appears crowded with professionals, while the World Wide Web has countless do-it-yourself pages with savings calculators and other financial tools.

There are nearly 40 million mass affluent individuals – those with investable assets ranging from $100,000 to $1 million – in the United States, according to Forrester Research. Deloitte estimates that more than a third of those investors do not work with financial advisors.