Services
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