Those of us who offer professional financial advice call themselves by a variety of names.
Financial advisors, financial consultants, investment advisers, financial planners and wealth managers all essentially do the same basic thing – they market and give financial advice. Unfortunately, all these different titles make it difficult to determine just exactly what a particular financial professional actually does and, more importantly, whether they are qualified to perform those duties.
Our practice revolves around two specific areas: personal investment management and portfolio-focused financial planning. After an initial consultation, we decide together which of these two basic directions, or client models, our relationship will take. We have developed a process that has the flexibility to address numerous personal financial topics while remaining relatively simple and easy to understand. This process is comprised of 6 steps applied within the 2 basic models. The 6 steps are: relate, reveal, recommend, realize, refine and renew and they are used with either the Personal Investment Management Model or the Portfolio-Focused Financial Planning Model.
The Personal Investment Management Model focuses almost entirely on investment management while the Portfolio-Focused Financial Planning Model is much more comprehensive.