Financial Strategies

 

FINANCIAL PLANNING

A comprehensive financial plan serves as a framework for organizing the pieces of your financial picture. With a financial plan in place, you'll be better able to focus on your goals and understand what it will take to reach them. 

One of the main benefits of having a financial plan is that it can help you balance competing financial priorities. A financial plan will clearly show you how your financial goals are related--for example, how saving for your children's college education might impact your ability to save for retirement. Then you can use the information you've gleaned to decide how to prioritize your goals, implement specific strategies, and choose suitable products or services. Best of all, you'll know that your financial life is headed in the right direction.

Creating and implementing a comprehensive financial plan generally involves working with one of our financial professionals to:

  • Develop a clear picture of your current financial situation by reviewing your income, assets, and liabilities, and evaluating your insurance coverage, your investment portfolio, your tax exposure, and your estate plan
  • Establish and prioritize financial goals and time frames for achieving these goals
  • Implement strategies that address your current financial weaknesses and build on your financial strengths
  • Choose specific products and services that are tailored to meet your financial objectives
  • Monitor your plan, making adjustments as your goals, time frames, or circumstances change

ESTATE PLANNING

By definition, estate planning is a process designed to help you manage and preserve your assets while you are alive, and to conserve and control their distribution after your death according to your goals and objectives. But what estate planning means to you specifically depends on who you are. Your age, health, wealth, lifestyle, life stage, goals, and many other factors determine your particular estate planning needs. For example, you may have a small estate and may be concerned only that certain people receive particular things. A simple will is probably all you'll need. Or, you may have a large estate, and minimizing any potential estate tax impact is your foremost goal. Here, you'll need to use more sophisticated techniques in your estate plan, such as a trust.

You've accumulated some wealth and you're thinking about retirement. Here's where estate planning overlaps with retirement planning. It's just as important to plan to care for yourself during your retirement as it is to plan to provide for your beneficiaries after your death. You should keep in mind that even though Social Security may be around when you retire, those benefits alone may not provide enough income for your retirement years Consider saving some of your accumulated wealth using other retirement and deferred vehicles, such as an individual retirement account (IRA).

Discussing trusts with your attorney

  • Trusts may be used to minimize estate taxes for married individuals with substantial assets.
  • Trusts provide management assistance for your heirs.*
  • Contingent trusts for minors (which take effect in the event that both parents die) may be used to avoid the costs of having a court-appointed guardian to manage your children's assets.
  • Properly funded trusts avoid many of the administrative costs of probate (e.g., attorney fees, document filing fees).
  • Generally, revocable living trusts will keep the distribution of your estate private.
  • Trusts can be used to dispense income to intermediate beneficiaries (e.g., children, elderly parents) before final property distribution.

The nature of estate planning is who you want to get what, how and when. Doing this in an efficient manor can provide well for generations to come. To evaluate all options and be certain that your plan design is comprehensive, thorough and exactly what you are looking for is our ultimate objective for you and your family.

RETIREMENT PLANNING

You know how important it is to plan for your retirement, but where do you begin? One of your first steps should be to estimate how much income you'll need to fund your retirement. That's not as easy as it sounds, because retirement planning is not an exact science. Your specific needs depend on your goals and many other factors

  • At what age do you plan to retire? The younger you retire, the longer your retirement will be, and the more money you'll need to carry you through it.
  • What is your life expectancy? The longer you live, the more years of retirement you'll have to fund.
  • What rate of growth can you expect from your savings now and during retirement? Be conservative when projecting rates of return.
  • Do you expect to dip into your principal? If so, you may deplete your savings faster than if you just live off investment earnings. Build in a cushion to guard against these risks

It's common to discuss desired annual retirement income as a percentage of your current income. Depending on your income desire, the idea of replacing 100% of your pre retirement income, will effectively maintain your standard of living well into your retirement. The appeal of this approach lies in its simplicity, and the fact that there's a fairly common-sense analysis underlying it: Your current income sustains your present lifestyle.

Retirement planning is also a key part of your estate planning. Plans of accumulation during your working years, income during your retirement, and then estate plan distribution to your heirs, are all  key aspects of good financial planning.