Planning for affluent families requires a team of experts – typically your Estate Planning attorney, your CPA, your financial advisor, and your insurance professional at a minimum. Coordinated and integrated planning, through what I call Integrated Wealth Strategies Planning, is the key to accomplishing your goals.
The ideal candidates for Integrated Wealth Strategies Planning include business owners, executives, professionals, doctors, attorneys and others with significant net worth. However, wealth isn’t the only measure of suitability. A good candidate for planning will also have a strong commitment to their family and loved ones, and a desire to arrange their affairs to maximize the benefit to themselves, their family, and the causes they support. With Integrated Wealth Strategies Planning you will be able to accomplish several things:
Maintain control of your assets and the planning process
Most people are interested in maintaining control at every step of the planning process and throughout their lifetime. The first benefit of Integrated Wealth Strategies Planning is accomplishing this goal of maintaining control – not only of your assets, but also of the planning process itself. Most clients have greater peace of mind when options and solutions are suggested and explained in an understandable way, with the ultimate decision about implementation remaining in the client’s hands.
Know if you have enough to meet your needs
One of the most frequent questions in a planning session is, “How can I know I have enough to last the rest of my life?” That question is best answered through careful analysis of your current lifestyle, your needs and desires during retirement, your tax situation, and several other factors. Through proper planning, you can both determine what you need, and decide how to best achieve the results you seek.
Make informed and intelligent financial planning choices
There are a myriad of investment choices and financial plans from which to choose. Only through comprehensive and integrated planning will you know which ones will work best for you.
Understand the risks and rewards of various planning strategies
There is a careful balance between risk and reward, and each strategy and solution finds that balance in different ways. In order to effectively plan, your advisors will take into account your age, your current asset mix, your risk tolerances, and many other factors to determine their recommendations for the best-integrated strategies.
Protect and grow your wealth
Most clients want to first make sure that the wealth they’ve already accumulated is protected, so that they don’t move backwards financially. But once the proper protections are in place, everyone would like to see their wealth continue to grow. Integrated Wealth Strategies Planning can help you accomplish both tasks – protection and growth.
Transfer your wealth to those you love
If you have people (or causes) you love, you may want to bless them with whatever wealth is leftover when you are gone. With proper planning, the actual transfer process can be relatively uneventful. Without proper planning, however, it can be traumatic on your family.
Minimize the impact of taxes during life and after death
All clients are taxed heavily throughout their lifetimes. Integrated Wealth Strategies Planning can help you reduce your taxes during life, and reduce or avoid them completely after death.
Discover new opportunities that you may be missing
Good planning is proactive, not reactive. Therefore, it not only affects the assets you already own, but it can help you discover new opportunities as well.
Take full advantage of planning today
Integrated Wealth Strategies Planning isn’t something that should be put off. It should be at the forefront of your mind to get the conversation going. Estate Planning is something that needs to be handled TODAY, because the reality that many of us do not want to face is that, TOMORROW may never come.