Our
Services
We are focused on providing exceptional client service to each family we serve to help them coordinate their entire financial life through three primary services: Comprehensive Financial Planning, Proactive Tax Planning, and Investment Management.
Comprehensive
Financial Planning
Proactive Tax
Planning
Investment
Management
These three services must be coordinated together in order to create a comprehensive and effective plan. Many families come to us with a similar problem. They have multiple advisors, often a CPA, Estate Attorney, and Financial Advisor, but none of the advisors talk to each other or know what advice the others are giving. As a result, the overall plan is not coordinated and leads to inefficiencies and mistakes.
Uncoordinated Plan
When there are multiple advisors who are not coordinating their advice, they are missing the bigger picture and are not able to effectively work toward a common goal. This results in wasted effort and an ineffective plan. The solution is to work with a financial advisor who has the skill and ability to coordinate the process to ensure your entire plan works together.
For families that have tax, estate, and insurance professionals that they enjoy working with, we are happy to coordinate directly with them. For families who do not have trusted advisors in each of these areas, we are able to fill the gap with our in-house CPAs and professional network of estate and insurance professionals which allows us to integrate detailed tax, estate, and insurance planning into the full wealth management process. When the advice from each advisor is coordinated, everyone begins pulling in the same direction toward a common goal.
Coordinated Plan
Our services are designed to create a coordinated approach to achieving your most important financial goals. Select each service below, to learn more about how we can specifically help you create a coordinated plan to reach your goals.
Comprehensive Financial Planning
Comprehensive financial planning ensures that all aspects of your financial life are working together toward a common goal, your success. Many of our clients have come to us from other advisors. Often their “financial plan” (if any) from their previous advisor was a 50+ page report that they did not understand and was not coordinated with any of the advice they received from their other advisors (tax, estate, insurance, etc.). Accordingly they did not feel confident that they were on the right track to reach their goals. We believe that quality financial planning is an ongoing process guided by experienced professionals that is proactive as life changes. In serving our clients, we focus on the following areas which must be integrated and monitored on a consistent basis to ensure you reach your goals.
Growth
Growth focuses on ensuring that you are effectively utilizing your resources to keep more of what you make, and make more with what you have. To maximize your ability to increase wealth, we consider options such as:
- Tax-advantaged retirement accounts
- Workplace benefits
- Tax-efficient investing
- Passive income planning
- Social Security and Medicare optimization
- Tax-deferred real-estate exchanges
Protection
Protection can be thought of as financial defense. You’ve worked hard to build what you have; so it is important to make sure you keep it. Insurance coverage is often an important part of wealth protection. To ensure you are protected we help you review and plan for:
- Insurance coverage
- Long-term care
- Personal and business liability protection
- Business succession
- Diversification and withdrawal strategies
Transfer
Transfer focuses on your goals beyond your lifetime and ensures you are prepared in case unexpected events occur between now and then. Before you begin creating a plan with an attorney and drafting the necessary documents, it is important to understand your options. We will take the time to help you consider what is possible and the implications of any decisions. Typical estate planning includes review of the following items:
- Asset titling and beneficiaries
- Wills
- Trusts
- Power of attorneys
- Health care directives
- Maximizing estate tax exemptions
- Reducing administration complexity
Giving
Giving represents the opportunity to use your wealth to create an impact in your family and the world around you. It is often one of our clients’ greatest joys. Our job is to help you do it in the most tax efficient way possible. There are many tools to make charitable giving more efficient. We will assist you with:
- Donor advised funds
- Charitable trusts
- Educational scholarships
- Various tax advantaged giving strategies
Are you on the right track to reach your financial goals?
Request a free financial evaluation to learn if we can help create a comprehensive plan to ensure your success.
Proactive Tax Planning
Tax regulations are complicated and constantly changing. Our CPAs are committed to understanding the tax regulations and how they impact you. Nearly all financial decisions and planning strategies are impacted by taxes. With proactive planning from a team that understands the tax implications, you can make decisions that will reduce the amount of taxes you pay over your lifetime.
Our in-house CPAs will integrate tax planning into your comprehensive financial and investment plan to make sure you keep more of what you make. We integrate tax planning into the wealth management process in the following ways:
Explain strategies to reduce the amount of income taxes you pay over the course of your lifetime.
Consider ways to reduce taxes you pay on social security and retirement account withdrawals through coordinating the timing of these payments.
Increase tax efficiency of investment portfolios through asset location based on the tax treatment of each account (Traditional, Roth, Taxable, Charitable).
Provide advice regarding employment benefits and incentive compensation (stock purchase plans, stock options, closely held stock).
Identify the most tax efficient way to fund charitable giving desires.
Inform you of tax deferral strategies for privately held real estate.
Suggest options to reduce or eliminate gift and estate taxes so that you can create the biggest impact for future generations or charitable organizations.
Taxes impact nearly all aspects of your finances. To create the best financial plan, you cannot afford to passively accept the taxes due at the end of each year. You need to proactively mitigate the amount of taxes you will owe. We are specially equipped to help minimize your tax bill.
Are you paying too much in taxes? Request your free financial evaluation to learn if we can help reduce the taxes you pay over your lifetime.
Investment Management
We recognize that each client has different goals and objectives which is why we take the time at the beginning of our relationship to learn what you’d like to accomplish with your wealth. The time we spend at the beginning allows us to craft an investment plan specifically designed to help you reach your goals. Whether your goals are focused on preservation or growth, there are certain aspects of our investment philosophy that are present in all portfolios.
Strategy
We focus on fundamental and value-based investing. We view investing as buying fractional shares of a business, and those fractional shares have value based on the assets and cash flow of the business. We do not make risky guesses on who will be the next “it” company or who will get lucky and hit it big. Put simply, we focus on investing and leave speculation to others.
Perspective
We believe that following the crowd can lead to unintended consequences – especially in investing. Investment news outlets make money with provocative headlines. Breaking news and hot topics are new every day. This news cycle is counterproductive to long-term success.
We are long-term investors that ignore the noise of the news cycle and focus on prudent investment principles that lead to success over time. We do not speculate with our client’s money or otherwise risk what they’ve worked so hard to earn.
Independence
As an independent Registered Investment Advisory firm, we are not incentivized, compensated, or required to utilize any specific company’s investment products. We are free to do our own research and choose the investments that we believe will help you meet your goals. This allows us to focus on investments that have the best combination of fundamental characteristics, low fees, and expected future results.
Diversification
We believe that investing is a balancing act between protecting what you have and building on it. To manage this balancing act, we carefully consider how to reduce the risk in your portfolio without significantly reducing the expected reward. To do this, we help you diversify your portfolio across companies, asset classes, and economies so you don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
Tax Efficiency
The tax advantages of retirement accounts (IRAs, Roths, 401ks, etc.) present significant opportunities for asset locating tax strategies. For example, investments that generate ordinary income are considered inefficient from a tax perspective because they are taxed at the highest tax rates. Accordingly they receive the most benefit from being held in a tax advantaged retirement account. Investments that generate capital gains, qualified dividends, or are otherwise subject to favorable tax treatment are more appropriately allocated to a taxable account.
We review your overall portfolio and work to maximize the tax savings by allocating investments to the specific accounts that will provide the best tax result across your entire portfolio.
Fees
Many advisors that are compensated on a commission basis benefit personally by selling investments with high fees. We do not. Our only compensation is fully transparent and comes directly from you, the client. Accordingly, we focus on creating portfolios using quality investments with low fees and expenses; so you keep more of what you make.
