Taxes

• Tax Planning
  Managing your taxes will help you reach your financial goals. The tax savings you realize by planning ahead will work in tandem with the other financial planning steps you take to secure your future. And, as your goals change and your personal financial situation changes, we will help you adjust your tax planning, too.
• Charitable Giving
  Our role in charitable gift planning is to help you carefully design your estate plan and to help you facilitate meaningful gifts in a way that also allows you to satisfy your other important financial concerns. Obviously, coordination with qualified estate and charitable gift planning attorneys is critical to assure the outcome is as intended.
• Estate Taxes
• Income Tax
  Once you’ve determined your retirement income needs, you must come up with ways to meet those needs. Obviously, the earlier you start planning and saving for your retirement, the easier it will be. However, it is never too late to start saving for retirement. One way to boost returns on retirement savings is to take full advantage of opportunities to defer federal income tax on your retirement investments. On any investment, your real return is the return you earn after taxes are paid and inflation is accounted for. While you can’t stop inflation, you can use various planning strategies to stop annual income taxes on your retirement savings and investments until you retire and begin using your money.

Investment

• Investment Management
  Therefore, we spend our time and energy identifying mutual fund managers that have provided consistently strong performance year after year relative to a meaningful peer group and benchmark. Because of the media’s focus on each year’s hot funds, many investors never hear about the funds that provide this kind of consistent performance. Our research of mutual funds and managers is conducted using an extremely thorough and analytical analysis of a number of important factors. Mutual fund excellence means more than last year’s return — or even the last ten year’s records. It must take into account a much wider range of factors, including fund management experience, performance consistency, expense costs, and portfolio management discipline. Managers who have a clear philosophy and consistently implement it through a disciplined process are more likely to be able to replicate the results. If we change our opinion on a mutual fund, it is usually because of a fundamental change in the fund or its management, not simply due to a shift in short-term performance.
• Mutual Funds
  This comprehensive process illustrates our hands-on, active approach to mutual fund selection, which empirical data suggests, has had a positive impact on the long-term consistency of our clients’ investment portfolio performance. Keep in mind, however, past performance is no guarantee of future results.
• Bonds
• Wealth Management
  As your wealth manager, we take the time to understand what you want out of life and how you feel about your wealth. We will help guide you along your financial journey. By talking with you about your life and your goals, we can assess any changes that need to occur in your financial strategy. For qualifying clients, we can organize all of your personal and family financial information in one place. Through WealthVision, our years of experience are coupled with a comprehensive approach and sophisticated technology. We consolidate your information and present it in a way that is easy to understand and available to you any time, day or night, even from a mobile device. If this comprehensive process seems perfect for you, or even if you feel your circumstances warrant a simpler approach, call one of our advisors to discover for yourself how our wealth management process starts and ends with your goals, allowing you to live your life and give life to your dreams.

Planning

• Financial Planning
  What is the value of a person’s life? Perhaps those who are dependent on that person for their financial well-being can best answer that question. It is also impossible to eliminate the emotional and psychological impact that a death can have to a family and/or business. Undoubtedly, life insurance is an integral piece of the financial planning and risk management process. In it’s simplest form, life insurance provides for a sum of dollars to be available to one’s family in the event of premature death. This lump sum is then used to cover the cost of dying, payment of debts, and to provide income to family and others who are dependent on a specific individual for their livelihood.
• Retirement Planning
  Our job in this retirement planning arena is to help you match your needs and goals with the most suitable financial products and investments available. Given today’s dramatically longer life expectancies, combined with declining Social Security payouts and escalating health care costs, your planning is more complex than generations before you. Thus, as a beginning point to retirement planning, we help you make a realistic appraisal of your financial situation and then help you to balance your immediate financial needs with long-term plans to help ensure that you don’t run out of money during retirement, and can enjoy the lifestyle you want.
• Annuities
  One of the easiest ways to defer taxes on your retirement savings is to invest through a tax-advantaged or “qualified” retirement plan, such as an employer-sponsored 401(k) or 403(b) plan or some form of an individual retirement account (IRA). Annuities and life insurance programs can also act as very tax-efficient retirement plan supplements due to their tax-preferred features and benefits.
• Long Term Care
  The government has made it clear that it will not be a primary resource for long term care costs. And, these costs can be significant. Estimates for the annual cost of long-term care (whether in an institution or at home) run from a low of approximately $75,000 to well over $100,000 depending on geographic location. This can obviously place a large burden, both emotionally and financially, on an individual and his or her family, regardless of how “wealthy” they may be.
• Asset Management
  Allocation. Asset allocation is the process of constructing a diversified portfolio from a wide range of different asset classes. An asset class is a broad group of similar securities such as corporate bonds, large company stocks, or foreign company stocks as opposed to a single stock or bond. Examples of other asset classes would include high yield bonds, small company stocks, U.S. Treasury bills, and real estate.
• Living Trusts
  Some of the tools we utilize to accomplish the protection of assets (as well as to accomplish additional financial planning goals) include: wills, testamentary trusts, living trusts, international “offshore” trusts, irrevocable trusts, “Delaware” trusts, limited liability companies and partnerships, family limited partnerships, qualified retirement plans, IRAs, life insurance, annuities, and obviously property, casualty, and liability insurance policies. All of these, in varying degrees, can be very effective in accomplishing asset protection.
• Charitable Lead Trusts
  Unfortunately, charitable planning is not considered often enough as a “building block” for an effective financial and estate plan. Through the use of various charitable giving plans, you may be able to increase the income from your property and/or arrange for management of specific assets. At the same time, income, estate, and gift taxes may be minimized or avoided- all while completing the charitable gift you would like to make. Among the many plans that can be considered are; gift annuities, pooled income funds, life estate agreements, revocable trusts, charitable lead trusts, charitable remainder annuity trusts, charitable remainder unitrusts, or donor advised funds.
• Asset Protection
  Protecting one’s assets from exposure to loss resulting from liability claims (medical or otherwise), bankruptcy, and/or unnecessary and avoidable taxation is an integral part of accumulating wealth and keeping it. True asset protection incorporates many aspects of a comprehensive financial plan and many of the products described on this web site. Depending on the size, complexity, and geographic location of your wealth, there are numerous strategies and vehicles available to assist you in protecting your wealth.