|
PERSONALIZED FINANCIAL PLANNING
Our approach doesn’t start with who we are – it starts with who you are. By personalizing a plan and placing your values, aspirations, resources, and time horizon at the center of all financial decisions, you’ll be in the best position to realize the future you desire.
Financial planning is much more of a process and partnership than it is a product or one-time exercise. Anyone can offer turnkey advice and share opinions about the “right” money moves to make. But there isn't just one solution to how money should be invested. Your financial plan must consider your specific situation - your goals, your needs, and the potential hurdles you may face in order to provide guidance on what makes the most sense for you. As life changes, we'll be there along the way to help make adjustments and ensure you're still on track to reaching your most important financial goals.
THE PROCESS
1) ONGOING DISCOVERY
|
Sitting down with you and your family, we take the time to understand the goals, issues, and concerns you have around your finances. What do you want your money to do for you? What are the risks and opportunities most relevant to you? How do you currently address these matters? What should change? Naturally, this is a never ending process as the answers to these questions will evolve over time.
|
2) LAYING A FOUNDATION
|
Once we learn more about who you are, what’s most important to you, and what you'd like your money to be able to do for you, we'll begin creating your personalized plan. We’ll collaborate with you and your tax and legal advisors to consider your tax and estate issues, risk factors and unique needs in order to develop a well thought out plan that is presented live in order to help you visualize the path towards your ideal financial future.
|
3) SCENARIO PLANNING
|
Going well beyond investments, we'll help you take strategic steps to address your most pressing concerns. Advanced planning helps with questions such as savings strategy prioritization, college expense funding, retirement income sequencing (where to take money from and when), social security optimization, business monetization, and charitable giving plans. All of these are coordinated to help ensure you are doing all you can financially while focusing on what's most important to you.
|
4) MONITORING PROGRESS
|
Your plan ultimately directs unique Investment Policy Statements that serve as a guide to how your investments will be managed in a strategic fashion, keeping everything in line with your long term financial needs. Easy 24/7 monitoring is available so you can check the status of your investment portfolio and track the ongoing progress of your overall comprehensive plan. Going forward, we'll maintain frequent contact with you while always being available to meet to review whatever's on your mind and talk through how to best help you stay on track.
|
CUSTOMIZED INVESTMENT MANAGEMENT
We believe in personalized investment strategies that focus on helping you meet your unique goals and objectives, rather than utilizing a one size fits all approach. We build goal-oriented investment portfolios sourced from research compiled by some of the most respected institutional investment firms in the industry in order to meet the investment needs your unique financial plan calls for.
Your investment strategy shouldn't be based on a hubristic promise from an advisor claiming they can consistently beat the market or that they have created the next great "proprietary stock selection process." Those marketing gimics are attractive to investors because they speak to human behavioral biases that focus on all the wrong things like stock selection, timing the market, chasing the latest fads, etc.
Instead, the portfolios we design for you take a more common sense approach with an emphasis on historical evidence and durability in order to withstand all types of market environments. The focus of each client's investment plan will consider the things we can control:
Diversification:
Portfolio diversification can improve portfolio returns and, more importantly, help limit inevitable declines in portfolio value. For each of your accounts that we manage, we'll take a multi-asset class investment approach to help grow and protect assets. This diversification helps increase your potential to achieve long-term goals while also controlling risk.
Long-Term View:
Objectives-based investing for the long-term rather than focusing on short-term comparisons to "hot stocks" or antiquated benchmarks is the path to successfully reaching the financial future you envision. This approach ensures your investments correlate with your financial goals rather than emotional reactions to nightly news headlines and market volatility.
Reducing Expenses:
Our approach primarily utilizes low-cost ETFs in an effort to avoid unnecessary trading expenses and additional management fees. Low costs are embedded not only in the investments we use to construct portfolios, but also in the cost-sensitive approach we take to implementing and maintaining portfolios.
Tax Efficiency:
We take a tax-focused approach to the design, transition, and day-to-day management of your accounts. We'll employ customized strategies depending on your unique tax profile and the current tax laws in place. Marginal tax rates, tax loss carry forwards, tax efficient asset location, after-tax yields, and tax-loss harvesting are just a few of the tax considerations we'll factor in as part of our process.
FAMILY WEALTH ADVISORY
For individuals and families looking to protect the financial security of their loved ones, it's important to design a plan that considers the legacy that will be left behind. Incorporating our personalized financial planning and investment management services, we'll shift the focus beyond your lifetime and formulate strategies designed to optimize your wealth-transfer wishes. Effectively planning ahead should lessen any chance of family conflict while preserving more of your wealth and reducing estate taxes.
We believe all plans are a continuous process, and when it comes to planning family wealth that certainly holds true. Life events, market ups and downs, and tax law changes can all impact your wishes. We'll work with you to make sure your strategy continues to focus on what's most important to you and to see that those goals are reached despite whatever changes come your way.
While family wealth advisory looks to the future, we know from experience that some of the most valuable advice we can give centers around the needs of those you care about - children, grandchildren, and parents. As your advisor, we are happy to help with any of their financial questions either directly or by simply sharing our thoughts with you. As your children or grandchildren enter the workforce, take new jobs, get married, have kids, etc. they'll have financial decisions to make and questions to ask. Hopefully having us available to lean on will provide you the peace of mind necessary to truly enjoy the excitement of those family life events without worrying about their financial implications.
