Our Financial Planning Process


Understanding You

Retirement should be a time to reap the benefits of your life’s hard work. But even affluent individuals may question their preparedness for the active and engaged retirement they often desire.

Our financial planning process begins with defining and prioritizing your goals. First, we explore your objectives and aspirations as well as any financial concerns you may have. These often include:

  • Will I outlive my assets or will my assets outlive me?

  • Where and how will I get income in retirement?

  • Will my spouse be financially taken care of if I pass away?

  • How much investment risk should I take?

  • Are my assets protected from lawsuits?

  • Who will get more of my money my heirs or the IRS?

  • How can I leave a lasting legacy?

Together, we prioritize your goals including your estate, legacy, education funding, philanthropy, real estate and other major purchases, travel, health care to help ensure that we are both focused on achieving what you value most.

Only after we’ve fully understood you and your goals do we begin developing and implementing your wealth management plan.

Your Wealth Plan

Based on our discovery process, we’ll construct a wealth management plan that seeks to preserve your lifestyle and achieve your goals while minimizing investment risk and volatility.

We often suggest constructing separate investment portfolios, or buckets, that focus on your different needs.

Your ESSENTIAL NEEDS bucket seeks to generate an income that helps support your lifestyle. Most clients want a tailored investment approach to replenish withdrawals and hedge against inflation.
Your WEALTH SURPLUS bucket seeks to generate wealth to transfer to future generations or to create a philanthropic legacy. For clients who believe their lifestyle would not be affected by a loss in this portfolio, we may recommend a higher risk, higher potential return strategy.

To arrive at our most confident investment recommendation, we rely on investment planning software to stress test our investment scenarios a thousand times, across a full range of market and economic assumptions. This leads us to a recommended investment plan that is appropriately diversified and based on your goals, dreams, concerns, and risk tolerance.

We communicate with you regularly, including in person reviews, to keep you fully informed about your financial picture. And we review your portfolios on a continuous basis, making adjustments as necessary. As your life and the world around you changes, we will examine your plan together to determine the impact and, if appropriate, recommend changes or adjustments.

Step by Step

1. DEFINE MAJOR LIFE GOALS

Our planning process begins by allowing you to explore what goals and dreams you have while addressing the concerns you have about being able to achieve them. This important step serves as the basis for the conversations between you and us as we accompany you through this planning process.

2. IDEAL AND ACCEPTABLE GOALS

Throughout your conversations with us, you explore your ability to achieve your goals in multiple scenarios, starting with the ideal and the acceptable. The ideal scenario represents your goals and dreams in a perfect world scenario. Meanwhile, the acceptable scenario represents the satisfactory compromises you could make to your ideal goals and still feel content with your life.

3. PRIORITIZE GOALS

To explore as much of your ideal scenario as possible, we encourage the use of our priority cards. This interactive activity ensures that we are on the same page, working together to achieve the goals you value most.

4. STRESS TEST GOALS

To determine the level of confidence you can achieve with your ideal and acceptable scenarios, our technology stress-tests each scenario 1000 times. During each of these 1000 iterations, your goals are subjected to simulated random market returns (up years, down years, flat years, etc.) to help you determine how likely you are to achieve your goals.

5. MAKING A RECOMMENDATION

Once we have an understanding of your ideal and acceptable scenarios, we will create a recommended scenario for you that will incorporate the goals you value most while potentially deemphasizing some of your lower priority goals.

6. IMPLEMENT ALLOCATION

Based on your goals, dreams, concerns, risk tolerances, and financial circumstances, we can propose an investment to help you achieve those goals. Our product neutral approach allows us the freedom to select investments that will help optimize your ability to achieve your goals.

7. MONITOR PROGRESS

The most important part of our process is the way you're able to monitor your progress toward the goals and dreams you wish to accomplish. Your plan will update each night and create a benchmark appropriate to your goals and circumstances. This information can be displayed on your statements and online.

8. NEW GOALS AND PRIORITIES

Change can present challenges, whether it happens in your own life or in the world around you. Whenever necessary, it is easy to update your plan to account for the changes and measure the impact it has on your ability to achieve your stated goals. if your investment plan needs to be updated, the appropriate adjustments can be made at your convenience.