Financial Planning
OUR SERVICES
Our Financial Planning Process and Services
The Introductory Meeting
The first step in helping you chart the course for your financial future is an initial complimentary meeting. During the meeting we get to know you better while we discuss your goals, dreams and challenges. It will also give you a chance to know more about us and our services. This is a great time to ask all of those hard questions you’ve always wanted to ask a financial professional, but were afraid to. We’ll discuss our tiered fee structure and the benefits of working with a local, privately owned boutique firm like ours.
Refining Your Goals & Priorities
Once we know you and your financial situation better, we’ll help you fine tune your financial goals and prioritize them. For example, if you’re still raising a family, we’ll help you figure out how to balance reducing your debt with continuing to build your retirement nest egg. All while staying conscious of the tax impacts of these choices.
Collecting & Crunching the Numbers
After we’ve gathered the details of your finances., we’ll run several analytical scenarios using our sophisticated financial planning and tax programs to see what would happen if one or more unexpected events occurred in your lifetime, such as unexpectedly losing a spouse or if you suffered a serious illness. We also run these analytics to see if our planning ideas can hold up in the event of negative shocks in the markets or the economy.
Your First Financial Plan
During this stage, we design your initial plan that’s tailored to fit the goals and wishes you’ve shared with us. We’ll meet again to review your initial plan; during the meeting if you have any changes you’d like to make, our planning software will display the results of those changes on-screen in real time. This allows you to see any potential negative impacts of those changes.
Putting the Plan Into Action
When you approve your initial financial plan, then it’s time to put the plan to work. Your plan may include some items for you to work on, such as how much debt you need to pay down each month, how much more you need to save for your retirement. After realizing how we can help, you may also choose give us assignments to work on if you hire us for additional services such as investment management, tax planning, estate planning or business succession planning.
Monitoring Your Plan over time
Monitoring is the most important phase of Financial Planning, because a financial plan is just a bunch of numbers and charts if you don’t put the plan into action and monitor it to make sure you stay on track. If you want to do all of your own investing and financial management, we’ll review your progress each year at no additional cost. If you’ve hired us for additional services, we’ll review your progress quarterly, semi-annually or annually, depending on what your preference is. For all of our planning and investment clients, we include one year of access to our Client Financial Portal, which enables you to check your financial progress in real-time any time would like view it. In the Client Financial Portal you can also setup additional financial goals, and track your monthly expenses.
