Our Process

Fully understanding a persons needs is a process we feel is not always addressed well by completing an on-line form. These “fill in the blanks” systems do help provide a sort of guidance; however it is human interaction which may shed the right light on a situation. When it comes to matters of your investments and planning for your future, having a professional who has taken the time to get to know you a little bit, may just offer questions and thoughts no on-line questionnaire could possibly address.

We encourage our first step as a direct meeting, in person if possible. Of course we can talk by phone if needed. The initial meeting gives us a chance to connect with you. We would like to fully understand what are the cross roads you see facing you, and establish if a relationship together will be a good fit. There are times when our services may not be the best plan of action for you yet and we do have referral partners for resources to extend to you.

Now that we have reached an agreement in working together, we need to clearly outline and address the objectives at hand as well as the future. We may ask for copies of statements or other documents during this process so we can gather all the relevant information necessary.

Many of the hours spent in doing our work is in the planning and review area. Once we have had our initial meetings and established an agreement on how we will work together, we collect our data and get to work. This process can take at times a few weeks as we will evaluate, ask questions, and have meetings with other professionals specialized in areas needed.

In these meetings we share with you the potential courses of action we feel are the best choices for your objectives. There may be a few choices which stand out among others as there will always be different ideas to pursue similar results. These meetings are designed to establish agreement on which strategy will be used for your needs.

Having a strategy is most effective when executed properly. Having a plan is just one step. Implementing the plan takes our work together and establishes action for it. Opening accounts, submitting transfers, making referrals for trust, estate planning, tax work, or other related task items needed to complete the planning objectives. Implementation may also be done in stages as there may be items which cannot be addressed immediately. These could be issues with proprietary products, surrender fees, cost basis concerns, or tax ramifications.

No financial plan is designed to just sit on a shelf gathering dust. These are active documents and as the financial world around you changes, so can the plan. We must therefore set standard review periods and benchmarks. The objective is to keeps us on track together. We also use this time to schedule out the next quarters of meetings and related objectives. Of course situations may occur in between these periods requiring a meeting. As life changes can happen at any time, having regular active communication between us allows many potential situations to already have a contingency plan in place.