1. Introduction
Typically, it begins with a simple phone call or Zoom meeting. This is your chance to tell me about what financial planning topics either keep you up at night or you want to address. For my part, I’ll tell you about our process, what your initial plan will cover and what areas we could pursue in greater detail if you decided to become a client. The initial plan and recommendations are no cost and you have no obligation to implement them nor to become a paying client.
2. Link & Share
If you’re ready to take control of your finances, we can move to the next step. I’ll send you an invitation to join our secure website. This is the client hub and it allows you to link accounts that are part of your financial picture, including banking, investments, retirement accounts, credit cards mortgages and more. Linking accounts saves you from having to collect and send multiple statements. In addition, there are tools for you to analyze expenses, set budgets and secure boxes to share files with me and even a private file to keep important documents.
3. Fact Finding & Goal Setting
From here we can get a high-level view of your assets and liabilities that will provide me context for our Fact Finding meeting. This meeting can be either “virtual” via Zoom, or in person. In general, these meetings are most productive when they are in person and include both you and any spouse or significant other.
While linking accounts provides much quantitative data, the meeting is primarily to learn about you and explore qualitative information. In addition to learning about your risk tolerance with investments, we want to understand your attitudes towards money and spending, what’s important to you and what motivates you. We will also encourage you to complete an expense worksheet to help you understand where your spending goes.
4. Initial Finding & Recommendations
The final step of our no-charge initial plan is to review our analysis on your current position and help you understand the probability of achieving your goals. We will make specific, actionable suggestions that you can implement. Our hope is that through this process you will come to value what financial planning can do for you and those you love.
5. Become a client!
It is only after we have provided you with our no cost advice do we discuss becoming a client and paying an asset-based fee (Typically between 1 and 1.5% of managed assets.) for continued financial planning and investment management. Should you wish to become a client, we would help you transfer your assets to our custodian (We proudly use Charles Schwab.) and help you implement the initial recommendations while highlighting additional items to cover in future meetings.
