For a detailed description of our approach to financial planning, please click here.

 

To us, financial planning is all about getting your financial house in order.

 

It’s the dynamic, complex and highly individualized process of evaluating your overall financial condition and making changes as your station in life evolves.  A good financial plan addresses and coordinates a strategy regarding all the things in your family’s life that involve money.

It’s also about being ready for life’s expected and unexpected “transition events”.  These events will often have a big impact on our lives.  Some may be joyful such as a marriage or a big promotion and others may be painful such as the unexpected loss of a loved one.

“Life in a Box”

Some people need very little help with financial planning.  They either have a good handle on their circumstances or have a relatively simple financial situation.  In these cases we look for anything that may have been missed.  Others may need a more complex plan.  Perhaps there is no clear strategy for retirement or perhaps they have gone through a divorce and need to rework their financial life.   Either way, we have a 44 point checklist we use to evaluate their situation.  We then provide a detailed list of recommendations with an implementation strategy for each one.

We believe that your investments are the most important part of your financial plan because your wealth is what will allow you to accomplish different financial goals.  You can have a great estate or retirement plan but what good are these if your portfolio has been destroyed by improper or ineffective management?  We look to evaluate not just your personal accounts (brokerage, IRA, trust, etc) but also make sure we look at your company retirement plan and any other situation where the value of your wealth is dependent on market movements.  All the disciplines of our Personal Investment Management Model are applied to your financial plan.

Your plan will focus on 5 major areas: personal finance, retirement planning, portfolio management, risk management (insurance) and estate planning.  We also consider tax issues pertaining to each of these 5 areas and incorporate them into the plan.

Every financial plan is different and we will focus on those areas most pertinent to you.  We prefer to keep things simple so clients always have the choice as to whether they way to do a comprehensive plan or just do a basic financial needs assessment.   Both methods are similar but vary in terms of their depth of analysis.

We usually like to begin a plan by looking at personal finance items to get a feel for where things currently stand.  After that, we look at all investments and begin to set up a formalized investment strategy.  Next, we like to look at retirement planning.  For many people, this is a very important topic and we look at pre- and post-retirement contingencies.  After that, we look at all insurance issues with a particular emphasis on containing costs and determining what coverage is appropriate.  Lastly, we look at estate planning and how to pass on assets efficiently.

If clients have other situations such as college planning needs or if they are business owners we incorporate those factors into the plan as well.