Financial Planning
What is comprehensive financial planning?
Comprehensive financial planning is essentially a roadmap for achieving your short- and long-term goals, using your money and other assets in the most effective way. It may include strategies for saving and investing, creating a will to protect your family, or ensuring they’re financially secure in the event of your premature passing. It's important to remember that there's always an opportunity to review or create your financial plan, and assess how best to structure your pension, retirement savings, and other assets to meet your unique goals. Fortunately, we're here to help you take that step and develop a comprehensive financial plan tailored to your family’s specific needs.
Our process
Comprehensive financial planning begins by defining your life goals in the short, medium, and long term. You start by prioritizing your goals, considering what you want to achieve, as well as any potential hurdles you may need to overcome. Once your goals are set, we will help you design a concrete financial plan to achieve them in the most efficient and practical way possible. Comprehensive financial planning is about getting organized and taking control of your finances, rather than letting your money control you.
Our six step financial planning process below is simple yet highly effective:
1. Establish your goals in life
Prioritize which goals you want to happen first, second, and third. We will work closely with you to define your personal and financial goals, understand your time frame for results and discuss how you feel about opportunity, risk, and stability.
2. Examine your current assets
This step requires gathering your relevant financial information and statements. Documents such as your investment accounts, pension statements, mortgages, and any wills are critical to review prior to getting the advice you need.
3. Evaluate how close you are to achieving your goals
You will need to analyze your information to assess your current situation and determine what is required to meet your goals. Analyzing your assets, liabilities and cash flow, current insurance coverage, investments or tax strategies is necessary at this stage of planning.
4. Develop a plan
Your plan will specify the necessary action items to achieve your specific goals. It will identify what you will need to implement, adjust, and create in order to get you on track to accomplishing you and your family’s goals in life. Your plan is the roadmap to achieving your goals.
5. Implement your plan
Follow your plan’s recommended changes and make it happen. Putting your plan’s recommendations into action one by one will ensure immediate results and ultimately get you and your family where you need to be. These concrete action steps will keep you on track.
6. Monitor your plan and make adjustments when needed
Your plan will need to be regularly monitored as you progress towards your goals. As life happens and changes occur with your goals, work, family, and otherwise, it is important to review your situation and adjust your plan on an ongoing basis.
The benefits of comprehensive financial planning
At Optimize Wealth, our comprehensive financial planning process examines the complete picture as it relates to your particular situation. We begin by listening to your specific goals and objectives. We then analyze various aspects of your financial situation to assess areas such as your pension plan, registered assets, general investments, and any company savings plans. Once we have completed our analysis process, we then turn our attention to designing a coordinated strategy to achieve your particular goals and objectives.
Optimize any company savings, pension, and other group benefits.
Define and quantify your goals as they relate to you and your family.
Protect your loved ones in various scenarios and situations.
Create an estate plan to provide for your loved ones before and after you are gone.
Determine your proper investment strategy.
Minimize your current and future taxes.