Broker Check

Services

Family Financial Management Services

 

Any good financial advisory firm is likely to:

  • Ask about your investment objectives
  • Provide a “Risk Tolerance” survey for your completion
  • Generate an asset allocation reflecting your Risk Tolerance Score
  • Manage your assets for a fee in accordance with your survey responses

 

If investment management is your only objective, that may be enough. That skips a lot though:

  • Determining and formalizing (in writing) your financial objectives, including:
    • Those of which you are already cognizant, and…
    • Those of which you aren't aware, but would choose to include if you were
  • Gathering detailed information regarding each area of your existing financial world, including, but not limited to:
    • Investments
    • Debt Management
    • Unnecessary Income Taxes your current structure may be allowing or causing
    • Existing Life Insurance contracts and their cost / value relationships
    • Your current estate exposure to unnecessary probate costs and delays not eliminated by having a will or a trust
    • Potential Unintended Heirs, including:
      • Your surviving spouse’s next spouse
      • Your daughter’s divorcing husband after she inherits from you
      • Your son’s surviving spouse’s next spouse
    • Existing unnecessary liability exposure
    • Built-in expenses in your current estate transfer plan, resulting from either:
      • Those in the plan the state wrote for you if you haven’t done a plan, or…
      • Those existing because you didn't take necessary steps following receipt of estate plan documents generated by a licensed estate planning attorney
    • Creation of a functional “Money Utility” Investment Asset Allocation Model based not on Risk Tolerance, but on “what you want your money to do”
    • Providing distribution strategies for your IRAs, 401(k)s, 403(b)s, and other tax-deferred retirement plans to prevent unnecessary taxes, not just to you and your spouse, but to your heirs. (The IRS Code does not allow an IRA Rollover to non-spouse beneficiaries.)
    • Creation of:
      • An “Estate Transfer Plan Outline” for delivery to your estate planning attorney (or one suggested for you), and…
      • “Custom Beneficiary Designation Documents”

Each designed to:

  • Avoid 6-18 months of probate costs, delays, hassle, and publicity
  • Prevent Unintended Heirs (like the government, an estate planning attorney, your surviving spouse’s next spouse, or your daughter’s divorcing husband after she inherits from you)
  • Assistance and/or direction in creating Pre-Need planning strategies to minimize costs at time of your death or that of a family member
  • At the time of a death in your family, handling of everything except the funeral arrangements, including:
    • Survivor Benefit claims
    • Insurance claims
    • Retitling assets
    • Restructuring retirement income plans
    • Restructuring primary and contingent beneficiary designations for the living family members (necessary if the deceased was named as a beneficiary of a survivor)
  • Active monitoring of Investment Advisory Accounts rather than farming it out to someone who doesn't know you

Your planning fee makes all of these services available to not just you, but your entire family.