“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.”
George Harrison
I recently spent three days with 1,000 financial planners and 100 enthusiastic tech wizzes from eMoney Advisor, a leading wealth planning platform and the provider of our financial planning software. The conference revived my excitement about the ever improving ways in which we can help our clients plan for their futures using the latest technology tools.
But let’s back up a bit. You may ask “Why do I need a financial plan”? The planning process is designed to help you start making decisions with clarity and to allow you to use your money to live the life you want. Working together we can make sure you make the right moves to create, build, and maintain your wealth.
A sound financial plan begins with a complete understanding of you. This, along with cutting edge technology, helps us understand exactly what your financial situation looks like.
Here’s an overview of how HTG and our robust planning software help bring clarity, order and peace of mind to the financial lives of our clients:
Getting Organized
Arguably the most challenging aspect of the process. With your own secure electronic vault, you can easily upload statements for things like your bank accounts, investment accounts, retirement accounts, Social Security statements and insurance policies into one place. You can also see all of your investments aggregated in one place and updated daily regardless of where they’re held (there’s a mobile app for easy access as well). This will give us a clear picture of your current financial standing and help us figure out where adjustments may be needed.
Setting Goals
This is your opportunity to consider what you want out of life. If you haven’t taken the time to focus on this that’s fine too. Some reflection on your values will often lead to your goals. We put your goals front and center when creating your financial plan. We will help you prioritize which goals get top billing and which are for down the road.
Creating a Strategy
This step will combine what we know about you today with what you want to accomplish tomorrow, and enable us to set specific action plans around things like leveraging your existing savings plan, repaying existing debts, really understanding your spending, and finding opportunities and adjustments you need to make in order to set you on the path to success. Once we’ve got your information gathered and input to our planning system, we can quickly and easily make adjustments to show how certain actions will change your outcomes.
Implementing your Plan
Opening the right accounts, setting up automatic transfers and contributions to and from those accounts, investing using a roadmap we create together with your goals at the forefront, and coordinating your plan with the other members of your network such as your CPA and estate lawyer are all key components. Understanding your entire financial picture helps us help you.
Reviewing and Adjusting
Life is full of transitions, challenges and opportunities, and your financial plan should evolve and change with you. We review your plan regularly and are ready to make adjustments as your personal circumstances change, so that we stay focused on our main objective: to help you identify and achieve your long-term goals.
Planning helps you identify where you are today, takes the guesswork out of where you’re headed and establishes what it will take to get you where you want to go. Incorporating our decades of experience and our tech rich planning functionality, we are well equipped to set you on the path to financial independence.