Why We Begin With a Free Review

Our process begins with a conversation about you—not just your financial life, but your personal life as well. We want to understand what is happening today, what is immediately important to you, what you want to accomplish over the next 2–4 years, and where you want to be 10, 20, 30, or even 40 years from now. We also want to understand what you hope to build, protect, and ultimately pass on to future generations. Money is a tool, and the purpose of planning is to help you use that tool to accomplish your personal, business, and financial goals. Keeping you and what matters most to you at the center of the process is the most important part.

From there, we complete a complimentary review of your overall financial picture. We look at your tax return, income, investments and asset location, retirement accounts, insurance, business interests, real estate, cash flow, and other areas that may affect your plan. Looking at the actual numbers gives us a much deeper understanding than a conversation alone. It allows us to identify potential tax savings, missed opportunities, planning strategies, and areas where we may be able to improve your overall financial position.

Once the review is complete, we meet with you again and walk through what we found. We share our observations, ideas, and potential opportunities, and give you a clearer picture of what a path forward could look like. This gives you an opportunity to see how we think, understand how we may be able to help, and begin building trust before making any commitment.

There is no charge for this initial review. Before you decide whether investing your time and money with us makes sense, we are willing to invest ours first. By the time we meet again, we will typically have spent several hours understanding your situation, and you should have a solid idea of the opportunities we see, the work that may need to be done, and whether working together makes sense.

What Happens After the Initial Review

If we decide to work together, the next step is to begin organizing and implementing the plan.

In the beginning, we may meet more frequently as we work through the opportunities we identified, coordinate with your other professionals, gather additional information, and begin putting the appropriate strategies in place. Depending on what needs to be done, that may mean meeting monthly for a period of time.

Once the plan is organized, we typically meet at least quarterly.

But planning does not happen only during scheduled meetings. When something changes in your life, business, income, investments, family, or financial situation, we want to know about it.

The goal is to make adjustments throughout the year instead of discovering months later that an opportunity was missed or a decision created an unintended consequence.

We help you stay organized, understand where you stand, and keep the different parts of your financial life working together.

That ongoing process is designed to help you:

• Improve your overall financial position

• Keep more of what you earn

• Identify tax and planning opportunities throughout the year

• Stay organized as your financial life changes

• Understand the impact of important decisions before you make them

• Make more informed and impactful financial decisions

• Keep your plan aligned with what you are trying to accomplish

Education is also an important part of our process. We want you to understand why a strategy is being considered, how it works, what the benefits and tradeoffs are, and how it fits into the rest of your plan.

The better you understand your options, the better decisions you can make with your money.