Financial Plans
Our retirement plans are put together using a three-meeting process. This process is designed to help you understand where you are today and what your financial future will look like. In our first meeting, we start by gathering documents so we can have certainty about your situation. We work from your actual financial documents, so we have command of the facts. We also talk with you to get to know more about you and what is important to you, so we have more than just the numbers. After our first meeting, we prepare your retirement models. The weeks between the first and second meeting, we carefully create a retirement plan specifically for you. In our second meeting, we provide you with your retirement plan. We will discuss your retirement plan, and we may discuss investment concepts and strategies relevant to your situation. Even if all the numbers are correct, collectively, we may decide to make a few adjustments. Between the second and third meeting, we will make any needed changes and prepare specific investments recommendations. Our third meeting is an overview of your retirement plan, and we will discuss our detailed recommendation for your investment models. Once you are in agreement, and we have the situation correct, we will present you with the specific recommendations for each account you have. Once we agree on the retirement plan, you are not under any obligation to have us implement it. We do think the implementation of the plan is the most important work we do when creating a retirement plan.
Managing 401(k)s
So many people simply guess when it comes to their 401(k) investments. For years, people have been on their own. Many advisors will take a look at your investments in the 401(k) and give you a static recommendation, which is never updated. More recently plans have set up generic models or put a computer based process in place to pick investments for you. We will take it a step further, if you want to have someone review your 401(k) and make adjustments to your account, as needed, we can do that. Most importantly, if you have a question, you can call and speak with us.
Answering Questions
Answering questions is pretty straight forward. Everyone has questions from time to time, even the most competent investor. Rather than not being available to people, you can call us and talk with us. If it is a simple question we can handle with a 20-minute introductory call, we will handle it at the moment for a simple flat one-time fee. If your question requires a little more work and research, we will give you an estimate of the time commitment and the fee for the service. We will answer your questions, and there is not a future obligation. If you want to have us available on a regular basis we can do this on an hourly basis or a monthly retainer, the option is yours. Minimum commitment is one hour or one month.
Implementation of Investment Decisions
Once we have created your retirement plan, we think the implementation of the plan is significant. Our plans come with specific recommendations. We will be prepared to implement the investment decisions we present in our final planning meeting of our planning process. Our investment decisions are updated on a regular basis as the financial markets change. We will keep your portfolio in alignment with our models as the model change over time. We look at the investments and models like recipes and ingredients. We will make changes to include the best ingredients, but we will not change the recipe without having a conversation with you first.