Retirement Planning
Will you have enough money to maintain your current lifestyle, or will there be an adjustment once you retire? Do you intend to reduce your estate to zero, or leave a legacy to your heirs and/or to a favorite cause? What can you do today to realize the retirement lifestyle you desire?
However you and your family envision your golden years, we’ll help you articulate your hopes and dreams for the future so that together we can create an actionable Retirement Plan to make your dreams a reality.
- Your “need” and “want” goals
- Your current financial situation
- Qualified plan rollover and conversion opportunities
- Anticipated future life events (marriage, starting a family, college funding, etc.)
- Assets and accounts
- Inflation and market changes
- Expected future cash flow
- An optimized Social Security and Medicare strategy
- Your legacy (charity, securing your family’s financial future, etc.)
- A potential inheritance
Factors that can make or break your Retirement Plan:
Tax-Smart Investing
As your life and financial situations evolve from year to year, so should your Tax Planning. That’s because every choice, action, and decision will may trigger tax consequences, and therefore must be viewed through the lens of taxes.
Evaluating the performance of your portfolio based on stated return doesn’t tell the whole story: it’s your after-tax return that really counts. From properly allocating income from various sources, to choosing certain investment strategies, to selecting a retirement plan and disbursement strategy customized to your situation, proper Tax Planning is an essential and complex wealth management component.
Taxes are not just an April concen
Taxes are a key component of your overall financial plan. We can help you with a forward looking view of each year’s tax considerations by helping you understand the tax implications of your routine financial choices, as well as those that come into play when you’re making major life decisions.
Goal Planning
A Goals Driven Wealth Management approach begins with a detailed analysis of your personal goals and then converting these goals into separate “financial milestones.” By quantifying your financial life goals, you are better able to evaluate whether your current assets and investment strategies are going to help you meet your future needs and aspirations.
- Core Lifestyle – Annual spending
- Discretionary – Significant asset purchases, such as a second home or boat
- Family – Gifting or support for family members or others
- Philanthropic – Charitable goals and legacy, during and after your lifetime
Investors have many different goals, but goals can generally be grouped into four main categories:
Cash Flow Planning
The purpose of cash flow planning is to help individuals, families, and businesses to manage their finances effectively and achieve their financial goals.
It’s critical to ensure that upcoming essential expenses will be taken care of without disrupting your lifestyle and longer-term financial planning objectives. What makes this even more complicated is that most clients have many different financial assets and investment accounts, each with different advantages and disadvantages that must be considered.
Whether you’re steadily accumulating assets and wealth, or retirement is right around the corner, we can coordinate these assets and income sources (including Social Security) with respect to your Cash Flow Plan, so you can live day-to-day with fewer unexpected interruptions, all while moving steadily towards the realization of your financial goals and dreams.
Risk Analysis & Insurance
It involves evaluating the likelihood and potential consequences of these risks, as well as developing strategies to manage or mitigate their impact.
In wealth management, risk analysis plays a crucial role in helping investors and financial advisors make informed decisions about their investment portfolios.
By understanding the risks associated with various assets and investment strategies, wealth managers can develop plans to minimize potential losses, optimize returns, and protect their clients' financial well-being.
Risk management tools like life, disability, long-term care, and even property and casualty insurance are especially critical, as major life events can have enormous consequences if not properly planned for. Having the right coverage can not only provide a smooth transition through an otherwise traumatic situation, but may also increase and diversify your investment portfolio, thereby placing a vital importance on Risk Analysis and Insurance in your overall wealth management strategy.
Our Risk and Insurance Analysis aims to evaluate the suitability of existing and potential policies in order to optimize this important part of your financial plan. And through periodic reviews that help ensure that your current strategy tracks with all of life’s changes, we’ll put together an insurance plan that can produce tax benefits and generate additional emergency funds, all while building the wealth protection and coverage you need for peace of mind.
Wealth Transfer Strategies
A Legacy Worth Protecting
You've worked hard to achieve success. Protecting — and strengthening — your legacy is complex, but the right partner can guide you, so you can carry your wealth momentum forward to your loved ones. A well-prepared estate plan is designed to preserve your wealth, allows you to help maintain control during and beyond your lifetime, and empowers you to distribute your assets according to your wishes.
Whether you intend to endow loved ones or a charitable organization, gift during your lifetime, or to make testamentary bequests through your will, tell us when and where you wish to direct your assets, and we can help to find the most advantageous ways to accomplish your objectives.
Important considerations in wealth transfer planning include:
- Basic estate planning documents (wills, powers of attorney, medical directives, etc.)
- Specially designed trusts, such as:
- Generation-skipping trusts
- Management trusts
- Bypass trusts
- Testamentary trusts
- Real estate trusts
- Family Limited Partnerships
- Beneficiary designations
- Trustee and Guardian selection
- Assets held in multiple legal jurisdictions (including foreign assets)
- Annual exclusions and lifetime applicable tax credits
Asset Protection Strategies
Asset protection refers to the various legal and strategies employed to safeguard an individual's or entity's assets from potential claims by creditors, litigants, and other potential claimants.
Protecting one's assets is essential for maintaining financial stability and ensuring long-term financial goals are met. A solid asset protection strategy not only shields assets from potential legal claims but also helps manage risk, minimize tax liability, and streamline estate planning.
- Pre- and post-nuptial protection
- Debt and creditors
- Bankruptcy
- Personal and professional lawsuits
- Guardianship challenges
- Will contests
We can work together to evaluate several types of risks and strategies:
Charitable Giving Strategies
Philanthropy That Looks at the Big Picture!
Children, youth, Animals, Education, scholarships, Arts, culture, Community betterment, Global needs. Whether you’ve identified favorite causes or are only beginning to consider how you might give back, your charitable interests can be a crucial part of the wealth management process.
A natural complement to other Wealth Transfer strategies, a proper Charitable Giving strategy provides an elegant way to leave a legacy during your lifetime or after death. When employed properly, planned giving strategies can even increase current income to the donor while simultaneously magnifying the after-tax value received by one’s heirs.
In working to construct a Charitable Giving strategy, we may consider:
- Direct gifts to charities
- Donor advised funds
- Pooled income funds
- Charitable lead trusts
- Charitable remainder trusts
- Charitable annuities
- Supporting organizations
- Private foundations
Individually Customized Portfolios
Our custom-designed, individually managed portfolios are always based upon the best interests of each client, and feature styles and objectives that are distinctively customized for each client and situation. Individually Customized Portfolio styles may incorporate long and short-term goals, or even a mix of both, and can range from fairly traditional and strategic approaches (such as Modern Portfolio Theory) to more active and tactical strategies.
Depending on your needs and goals, your Wealth resource advisor will work with you to create a customized portfolio designed for your current situation, future aspirations, and your overall financial plan.
Investment Philosophy
we believe that investing – when done correctly – is neither sexy, nor sport, nor gambling. Rather, investing is ultimately the means to an end.
Our philosophy is that any investment program must always begin with an understanding of that “end:” your goal, reason, or purpose for investing. Only then can we consider the “means,” or what it will take to design a portfolio to reach your goals.
Once we have a clear understanding of your objectives, we can craft an individually-customized investment program that provides a realistic likelihood of achieving those goals, while accepting no more risk than is likely necessary to attain your dreams and ambitions.