Build your future with a personalized goal-based financial plan. Providing a great client experience is increasingly important for advisors. This includes a commitment to maximizing client empowerment, participation, and confidence. But how can this be accomplished?
Taking a Proactive Approach to Your Finances
Financial empowerment isn’t just about having wealth or a balance in your bank account. It’s about controlling your finances, feeling emotionally at ease with them, and knowing you have a plan to meet your goals. Advisors like Frederick Baerenz can increase clients’ sense of control by focusing on milestones and ideals instead of individual strategies. For example, rather than just recommending an RRSP, an advisor can help clients envision their desired lifestyle in retirement and determine the income required to support it. Or, they can discuss children’s education aspirations before deciding how an RESP would help them.
Creating a Comprehensive Plan
A comprehensive plan is a long-term guide that captures how a community should look for 20 years or more. It includes studying current conditions and future trends, goals and objectives, land use, transportation, housing, public facilities, economic development, natural resources, human heritage, and quality of life. A thorough process includes the collection of data, goal setting, and an opportunity for public input. This information is then used to develop a comprehensive plan. The plan also guides the creation of zoning regulations, the legal tool that implements the comprehensive plan’s vision of the community’s future. Advisors such as Fred Baerenz works to improve clients’ financial literacy. Helping them understand how their investments work will allow them to make better decisions. They can also recommend investment strategies to help them achieve their goals, such as asset location (putting assets in the most tax-efficient accounts) and specialized strategies like tax loss harvesting.
Understanding Your Goals
While people feel less confident in their wealth plans, they can gain more confidence by connecting with and feeling empowered by their advisors. This may include discussing and identifying goals, understanding investment options, navigating life changes, and providing encouragement. Advisors use many tools and calculators that help with goal setting, evaluating progress toward those goals, and more. For example, the retirement planner allows you to enter your biographical information and shows how much you can expect from Social Security at varying times. It also breaks down your savings habits and offers improvements to increase your odds of reaching your goal.
Getting Started
Whether investors are starting their investing journey, in the middle of their lives, or nearing retirement, financial literacy and an objective advisor can help them pursue their goals. Those goals include avoiding common financial pitfalls, getting back on track after an investment setback, or simply gaining peace of mind. Advisors help clients build a holistic plan considering their short-, mid-, and long-term goals. Their initial meetings focus on understanding each client’s unique “money persona” and priorities.
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