Many smart consumers aren’t aware there is a profound difference between receiving sound bites of planning advice in the process of getting your investments managed – and the experience of going through an intentional financial planning process. An intentional financial planning process involves deep discussion regarding your aspirations and concerns for the future of your life, your family and your life’s work. These are not questions checked off a shortlist. They are robust conversations that become the landscape for the financial aspects of our working relationship.
True financial planning also includes collecting your many types of assets, and integrating them into a common set of financial projections. Legal, tax and financial disciplines are unavoidably linked through the tax code, the financial markets and the economy. It is not possible to make efficient strategic decisions about your future without evaluating your total picture. With our process – for the first time in most peoples’ lives – they can actually see how their whole financial life comes together.
What’s the difference between a financial product and a financial plan?
Many traditional approaches to planning attempt to separate the family aspects of planning from the financial decisions. Also, the process is treated as a project, suggesting that planning done once can serve the lifetime of the family or business.
At the end of the day, planning is about lives and livelihoods. Planning done well considers the people and the financials together. And the plan itself is cared for consistently over the lifetimes it’s purported to serve.
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Why pay a fee for financial planning?
If you’re promised a financial plan for free, the methodology itself creates more questions than answers. How thorough is your plan if the professionals aren’t being compensated for their time and wisdom? If it isn’t thorough, which elements have been left out and which opportunities were left unexplored? Planning without a fee treats the plan itself as a middle man: an obstacle in the way of a transaction.
In our experience at Phillips Financial, planning fees change the way everyone in the relationship thinks about the relationship. And, how you think about a relationship influences its long-term health and dynamics.
Planning fees signal you and your advisor that it’s time to focus on the plan itself. When an advisory relationship begins with a clear commerce exchange, there’s no smoke and mirrors in play. It sets your clarity as the core objective for the discussions.
What is Fiduciary Duty?
A Fiduciary Duty is a duty to act in another party’s best interests. Parties owing to this duty are called Fiduciaries. They make a professional commitment to disclose and minimize conflicts of interest whenever possible.
Many individuals and families aren’t aware that an advisor’s business model directly affects the standard to which they are held. If the advisor is not a Fiduciary, they can offer you a product, and the product simply needs to be a logical choice based on limited information at a specific point in time. They are not required to look at your bigger picture.