Money means different things to different people. Each of us has different dreams. You may want to achieve financial freedom, provide seed capital or a top-flight college education for your children or grandchildren, have a vacation home on the beach or in the mountains, or leave behind an enduring legacy that will allow you favorite charity to continue its work.
Whatever your dreams are, you need a framework for making decisions about your money that will help you achieve them. You probably have a wide range of financial goals and diverse financial challenges. This requires a broad comprehensive outlook. You want real wealth management – a complete approach to addressing your entire financial life.
It’s a challenge to find a firm that provides true wealth management. Many firms really only provide investment management and offer a couple extra services. We define wealth management as a formula:
WM = IC + AP + RM
Investment consulting (IC) is the astute management of investments over time to help achieve financial goals. It requires deep understanding of clients’ most important challenges. Investment plans must take into account clients’ time horizons and tolerance for risk and describe an approach that maximizes the probability of achieving goals. It also requires advisors to monitor their clients’ portfolios and financial lives over time so that they can make adjustments to the investment plans as needed.
Advanced planning (AP) goes beyond investments to look at all the other aspects that are important to your financial life. We break it down into four parts:
- Wealth enhancement
- Wealth transfer
- Wealth protection
- Charitable giving
Relationship management (RM) is the final element. True wealth managers are focused on building relationships within three groups.
- Clients – Wealth managers must foster solid, trusted relationships with clients to effectively serve their needs.
- Network of financial professionals – Wealth managers need experts they can call in to address specific client needs.
Other professional advisors – Wealth managers must be able to work effectively with other advisors, like attorneys and accountants.
Disclosures: This blog is intended to provide general information only and should not be construed as an offer of specifically tailored individualized advice. Please contact Independence Advisors, your accountant and/or attorney for advice appropriate to your specific situation.
Investing in any security, including mutual funds and ETFs, involves a risk of loss of both income and principal.
This blog may include forward-looking statements. All statements other than statements of historical fact are forward-looking statements (including words such as “believe”, “estimate”, “anticipate”, “may”, “will”, “should”, and “expect”). Although we believe that the expectations reflected in such forward-looking statements are reasonable, we can gove no assurance that such expectations will prove to be correct.