| Financial Planning for Individuals
At least one meeting a year will be dedicated to a deep dive into one or more financial planning topics. Together, our advisors proactively determine which financial planning topics should be reviewed. These topics include:
*Estate planning
*Tax strategies
*Insurance planning, including life, disability, long-term care, and property and casualty
*Employer benefits
*Education planning
*Budgeting and cash flow
Some advisors only provide deep, detailed financial planning at the beginning of the client relationship. As with retirement planning, we monitor your financial plan by reviewing each area every few years, or more frequently as needed. Life changes, and so should your financial plan.
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| Financial Advice & Consulting
As trusted advisors, our job is to help you address the complexities of today's marketplace with professional guidance, a disciplined process, proper resources and unceasing vigilance.. As trained professionals, it is our privilege to offer you this kind of service because in your busy life, you have better things to do than keeping up with the markets.
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| Portfolio Management
Our investment management services include the following:
Help you establish your investment goals and assess your risk tolerance
Help you select a suitable asset allocation model and the appropriate investments based on your goals and risk tolerance
Monitor the performance and risk of your portfolio allocation and investment managers
Review the performance of your Raymond James accounts at each meeting
Research and monitor your employer retirement plans (401k, 403b, restricted stock, stock options, etc.) for you
Active tax and cost-efficient investment portfolio management for assets held at RJ. This will include manager and strategy selection
As requested, implementation of cost and tax efficient liquidations for unanticipated cash flow needs
Help you update your portfolio as your needs change
Review your risk tolerance every 3 - 4 years or earlier if your personal or financial situation changes
Coordinate the establishment of appropriate Raymond James accounts and related asset transfers
Online access to your Raymond James accounts
Depending on your account activity, receive quarterly or monthly Raymond James account statements
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| Retirement Planning
The majority of your working years have been spent building your savings with the goal of a confident retirement and perhaps preserving a portion of your estate for your heirs.
We provide you with detailed retirement projections that incorporate your expenses, investments, Social Security and any pensions or other income you might have.
We also take the extra step to analyze various scenarios for you. Based on your situation, these could be:
" Different life expectancies
" Maximizing your Social Security benefits
" Various pension payment options
" Paying off your mortgage, or keeping a balance
" Self-funding a long-term care event
We also want to emphasize that we monitor a client's retirement by doing a retirement projection every few years, or more frequently if a client's situation changes. This contrasts with some advisors who only run a retirement analysis once at the beginning of the client relationship.
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| Insurance Planning
We are a fee-only firm and do not sell insurance for a commission. However, we will review your various insurance policies and provide recommendations.
How much life insurance do you need now? If you have a policy with a big premium and it's time to renew, we check if you need to renew it or is it time to cancel?
Do you need more disability coverage? When you're closer to retirement, can you drop that disability coverage?
Long-term care insurance - how much coverage should you get? With the recent huge price increases in this area, we've worked to help clients trim the benefits where possible to help mitigate premium increases.
We review your property & casualty policies, to pinpoint any holes in coverage, most of which are inexpensive to fix.
On all of these, we help you get quotes from various sources and work with you to evaluate the quotes.
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| Annuities
We do not sell annuities because we cannot accept commission compensation. We are a fee-only firm and use the fiduciary standard. That means we must act in the client's best interest; that's you! We will, however, help answer any questions and offer our advice about your existing annuities
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| Tax Advice and Services
We try to moderate taxes by the choice of investments we use. We have minimal selling and buying, which keep gains from showing up on your tax return. We harvest losses and gains during the year, trying to net taxable gains to zero when feasible.
When we've made a lot of money on an investment, we often sell over multiple tax years to minimize your tax bill. For example, we purchased a mutual fund 9 years ago for our client and sold out of it over 3 tax years. So, we avoided huge gains hitting a client's tax return in a single year bumping them up into a higher tax rate.
We often custom-manage a taxable account in order to keep taxes down.
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| 401K Rollovers
We will research and monitor your employer retirement plans (401k, 403b, etc.). We will also help verify how much you are contributing each year, verify how much of the employer match you are receiving, and place trades in your accounts when needed.
We can also manage your 529 education plans, employer stock purchase plans, and executive restricted stock and stock option plans.
For all accounts under our management, we review the accounts and investments at your investment review meetings.
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| Estate Planning & Trusts
Creating a financial plan helps you see the big picture and set long and short-term life goals, a crucial step in mapping out your financial future. When you have a financial plan, it's easier to make financial decisions and stay on track to meet your goals. Working with a Certified Financial Planner"/professional can give you confidence knowing you have a plan in place designed to/help you reach financial success.
We recommend estate planning approaches based on your situation. Trusts are better for some clients, while beneficiary designations may suffice for others (and be cheaper).
Our estate planning schedule organizes all your assets, not just the investments, and ensures you have the titling and beneficiaries set up correctly, per your desires and your attorney's instructions. We review your trust documents, your wills, your powers of attorney from a financial planning perspective. We have also reviewed client's prenup agreements prior to getting married.
If you desire, we can accompany you to meetings with your estate planning attorney, to help with what needs to get done.
Our Comprehensive Financial Planning and client relationship management process is designed to enhance your financial foundation to help you enjoy greater freedom and independence during your retirement. After we gather all your financial information, our team works with you to design a plan to organize and manage your finances, achieve your goals and enjoy your life.
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| Education Funding and Planning
We recommend how you can best save for college for your kids or grandkids; there are many options, some of which save on taxes. We manage the investments in those accounts. You'll know how much you need to save each year based on the colleges you have in mind.
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| Investment Advice & Management
We are research-driven and use many sources of professional-grade research. We incorporate third-party analysis which tells us when passive index funds may deliver better returns, or when active funds may outperform, in a given area of investing.
We do not delude ourselves, or you, that we are smarter than everyone else. If the research points in a certain direction which will give us a better return with the risk level we want, we use it.
We manage your money via our Investment Committee combining years of experience with deep knowledge, to drive our decisions. We believe that a collection of minds is superior to any one person's opinion or belief. That's the team you want managing your money.
Three of our committee members are CFP planners, specializing in different aspects of wealth management. To pass the CFP exam requires intense study for a least a year and is the gold standard of qualification in our industry.
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| Wealth Management
As trusted advisors, our job is to help you address the complexities of today's marketplace with professional guidance, a disciplined process, proper resources and unceasing vigilance.
As trained professionals, it is our privilege to offer you this kind of service because in your busy life, you have better things to do than keeping up with the markets.
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| Risk Management
When we work with a new client, the first step is to assess how much investment risk you should take. We do this by using a risk tolerance assessment, along with conversations about your financial situation, your goals for your money, your personal level of risk taking and your ability to withstand losses in a bear market.
After we agree upon a risk level, we analyze your current investments and develop a proposal that shows you how we will invest each of your accounts. The proposal will also take into consideration any investments you may want to keep and investments with large unrealized capital gains, as well as any tax implications of the proposed trades. Rest assured, before we place any trades in your accounts, you will clearly understand how we will invest your portfolio and any costs or taxes associated with our recommendations.
After we implement the agreed-to proposal, our Investment Committee continually monitors the investments in our client's portfolios. At your meetings, you will see Monitoring Reports that show you how the investments are performing.
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| Money Management
First, we believe diversification and a long-term perspective helps lower your risk of loss and helps increase long-term returns. We do not believe active trading or short-term trading strategies are helpful or appropriate for most investors. Therefore, we usually invest our clients in diversified stock and bond portfolios built for the long-term.
Second, we use indexed investments in client portfolios. What are indexed investments? These are investments that are designed to track an index, such as the well-known S&P 500 U.S. stock index. We use indexed investments in our portfolios for two important reasons. The first is because research has shown it is very difficult for mutual funds to beat their respective index, or benchmark. Morningstar and Standard and Poor's research has shown over the past 5, 10, 15 and 20 years, most mutual funds do not beat their benchmark. The second reason is indexed investments usually have much lower expenses, and Morningstar has consistently emphasized that cost matters when investing for the long-term.
Third, we believe your portfolio needs to invest in our global economy. Many of our largest companies operate globally, in many different countries. Your investments need to reap the benefits of economic successes happening abroad.
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