The first step is to have a broad discussion about your personal and financial circumstances. This information may include your health and life expectancy, your family, your life goals and risk tolerance, your earnings potential, your assets and liabilities, or any other bit of information that may impact a financial plan.

The next step is to identify your potential goals. This begins with an open conversation about our assessment of your circumstances. From there, we can get into the details about short-term and long-term goals, as well as a general discussion of how they could be funded. We help you to prioritize and crystallize goals and aspirations. We analyze your current situation by gathering and organizing all your objectives and current financial information into one consolidated report that is a snapshot of where you are today.

This step establishes the connection between good information and successful goal setting, which is the heart of comprehensive financial planning. This is where we explore if and how you should proceed to achieve your goals. It’s important to closely evaluate the material advantages and disadvantages of your current course of action to illustrate why certain changes may be necessary. We must also evaluate any alternative courses of action that will maximize your chances of achieving your most important personal and financial goals. Here, we use sophisticated technology and tools to appraise and analyze the current value of all your assets. Then we evaluate and assess your financial conditions, challenges, and opportunities as they relate to the goals.

From all the potential courses of action identified, now we must select a recommendation or multiple recommendations that will best serve you in achieving your most important goals. Financial planning recommendations should scale to your needs and address your deepest concerns. Our recommendations may require you to re-prioritize or sacrifice certain aspects of your current lifestyle. We will formulate recommendations that balance your preferred outcomes with your ability and willingness to achieve them. With your current assets' values, we then examine your goals, assets and financial expectation to generate what actions are needed to help achieve your goals.

Presenting planning information in a meaningful way can help steer you to the decisions that strike the optimal balance between your goals and constraints. Once we’ve developed a plan based on your needs, we will provide options on how to address them in a beneficial way. We’ll create various planning scenarios and model a variety of planning techniques to clearly illustrate your options. Together, we will compare planning scenarios against “what if” scenarios and provide suggestions and alternatives in order to help you achieve your stated goals. We then will generate and deliver a comprehensive written plan. Details of our suggestions are provided to you in two ways - in a comprehensive report and online through your own secured website.

Once we’ve agreed on a realistic path forward, implementation will depend on the nature of our recommendations. This could involve guidance in the form of referrals to other professionals (e.g. legal, tax, or insurance) or action (e.g. configuring direct transfers or investment management). Either way, there will likely be follow through required by both you and us. Here we help you to implement the financial decisions. We will orchestrate everyone’s efforts, including:

• Addressing implementation responsibilities
• Identifying, analyzing, and selecting actions, products, or services
• Recommending actions, products, or services for implementation
• Selecting and implementing actions, products, or services

Clearly communicating each task, including educating you on how you can best serve yourself in achieving your goals will helps bring financial planning recommendations to fruition.

The seventh and final step of the financial planning process is ongoing, spanning the length of the engagement with you. As your financial lives evolve, we’ll need to discuss any changes to your goals and your ability to achieve them, gather and assess information, and make recommendations on how best to move forward. Here, we meet regularly with you to review goals and progress and to update the plan as needed. This creates meaningful experiences that help you achieve your financial goals.