“Financial Choreography starts where you are with advice that is tailored to you.”
My clients are looking to protect their financial independence, freedom and autonomy throughout all stages of their lives. To that end, it is an essential prerequisite that the person giving them advice acts from a position of independence, freedom and autonomy themselves.
Financial planning is where every engagement with my clients begins.
We make financial decisions every day:
Making those decisions isn’t easy. We don’t live in a vacuum and our lives aren’t static. Often the decisions we make impact not only ourselves, but others – our spouse, our children, sometimes our parents. These responsibilities and commitments can bear down on us with great weight because we can barely assess the long-term implications of our choices for our own lives, much less the lives of our loved ones.
Designing an investment portfolio is rarely an end in itself. While our investments are a funding-mechanism for our financial goals, our decision to invest reflects our temperament and disposition towards our own future – we invest because we are either optimistic, pessimistic, hopeful or fearful about where we think our lives will take us. It is important to understand this because our psychological and emotional responses can greatly impact our investment results over time.
When my clients entrust me with investing their money or managing their wealth, I become a steward of at least a portion of their core capital – the cumulative sum-total of wealth they have accumulated throughout their lifetimes and that may also have been passed on to them by previous generations. As such, it is a central part of my role as an advisor to protect my clients from making potential mistakes, financial or emotional, which could put all of that at risk.
Read More BelowSome of the most profound, yet confounding decisions we have to make as we enter retirement age are decisions involving our healthcare and how to pay for it. In that regard, the decisions we make at the outset, when we become eligible for Medicare at age 65, are often the ones that are of greatest consequence for our quality of life for the rest of our lives.
Every story has an ending. The question, when our story ends, is how it will continue to be told by our children and grandchildren. What will the narrative be? How will we be remembered? What impact will our values and beliefs have on future generations? The answers to those questions are what shapes our legacy.
Our legacy goes far beyond the size of our estate or the inheritance our children will receive. While having life insurance, or reducing estate taxes, or setting up trusts can be indispensable and worthy goals of good estate planning, that alone is not enough to create something that we can proudly hand over to the next generation. What is needed is a clearly articulated sense about what we want the sum-total of all the financial decisions we have made over the course of our lifetime to amount to. In other words, we need to act on our intentions with clear purpose.
Read More BelowFinancial planning is where every engagement with my clients begins.
We make financial decisions every day:
Making those decisions isn’t easy. We don’t live in a vacuum and our lives aren’t static. Often the decisions we make impact not only ourselves, but others – our spouse, our children, sometimes our parents. These responsibilities and commitments can bear down on us with great weight because we can barely assess the long-term implications of our choices for our own lives, much less the lives of our loved ones.
Whenever we may have sought advice along the way, chances are that we were presented with an array of financial products, strategies and solutions that we were told could address our problems in a variety of different ways. As a result, we often eventually find ourselves having accumulated a potpourri of financial assets: IRAs, 401(k)s, investment accounts, annuities, or insurance policies.
What we don’t have, however, is a clear understanding if and how all of the pieces work together, in harmony, to enable our well-being. We find ourselves, again, not knowing what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. We know we don’t lack choices, but we don’t know how to choose and often we don’t even know where to start.
What we need is a process of planning that lays out our organizing principles, informs our decision-making, and addresses important, key questions:
By answering those questions it becomes possible to set a course of action that can lead to the outcomes we want. Getting to those answers is what Financial Choreography® is about – and that is where we will start.
Designing an investment portfolio is rarely an end in itself. While our investments are a funding-mechanism for our financial goals, our decision to invest reflects our temperament and disposition towards our own future – we invest because we are either optimistic, pessimistic, hopeful or fearful about where we think our lives will take us. It is important to understand this because our psychological and emotional responses can greatly impact our investment results over time.
When my clients entrust me with investing their money or managing their wealth, I become a steward of at least a portion of their core capital – the cumulative sum-total of wealth they have accumulated throughout their lifetimes and that may also have been passed on to them by previous generations. As such, it is a central part of my role as an advisor to protect my clients from making potential mistakes, financial or emotional, which could put all of that at risk.
We will carefully lay out our objectives and assumptions, evaluate the various risk factors, and think about potential unknowns before we make any investment decisions. We may decide to use stocks, bonds, mutual funds or exchange-traded index funds. No matter what tool we use, however, the undisciplined pursuit of “more” will not be part of our quest. Nor will we try to beat an arbitrary index because “outperformance” is neither a strategy, nor a plan.
Our priority will be to design and implement an investment plan that, when viewed as a whole, matches the cadence of your life and that can be flexible enough to adapt as your circumstances change over time. We will seek broad diversification and structure the portfolio in a way that is easy to understand, manageable and efficient in achieving its purpose.
When we are in retirement, or contemplating retirement, three financial questions reign paramount:
Beneath those questions, however, lies a more profound concern, often unspoken, about whether we will be able to maintain our autonomy, independence and dignity as we get older. In short, what is truly at stake is our ability to maintain authorship over the final chapters of our own life’s story.
These concerns are often amplified by the inherent uncertainty about the future:
Merely having in place an investment plan based on generalized assumptions about long-term market returns and with vaguely defined long-term “goals,” is not enough to meaningfully address these concerns. What is needed, instead, is a deep understanding of how to create sustainable life-long income and how to assess, and deal with, both investment and life risk. With this understanding, we can create the financial conditions for living a sustainable and prosperous life.
Some of the most profound, yet confounding decisions we have to make as we enter retirement age are decisions involving our healthcare and how to pay for it. In that regard, the decisions we make at the outset, when we become eligible for Medicare at age 65, are often the ones that are of greatest consequence for our quality of life for the rest of our lives.
We teach, on a regular basis, educational seminars and webinars to demystify the world of Medicare. We can also assist you, on an individual basis, in making informed decisions among your various options and help you sign up for a Medigap, Medicare Advantage, and/or Standalone Prescription Drug Plan.
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