Why should we pay an advisor- financial or otherwise?   What value do they add?  This can be answered in several ways and depends on what services the advisor is providing you and your family.

A financial advisor can help you define your personal goals and vision and then develop a plan to achieve them.   Once the plan is developed they can help monitor the plan and make specific recommendations on an ongoing basis.   Certainly you may be able to do this on your own, and there is a cost for the advice, so is it worth it?  The answer depends largely on you, your needs and your expectations.

From a personal standpoint you must first ask yourself if you have the experience and knowledge to handle your own wealth management.  Then there is the question of what your time is worth and if you could better spend it in your own profession or enjoying leisure activities.   Besides having specialized knowledge about tax,  estate planning and investment issues financial advisers may offer a tremendous amount of value by providing independent and objective advice when dealing with emotional decisions impacting one’s financial well-being.  This is important for the same reasons that a doctor doesn’t practice medicine on him or herself and lawyers do not represent themselves. Having an objective third party is very important when dealing with decisions.

From a purely objective standpoint research by David Blanchett and Paul Kaplan of Morningstar has quantified the value that financial planners can provide.  Their research shows that financial planners help individuals generate roughly 1.82% excess return each year, creating roughly 29% higher retirement income wealth.  This means even if an adviser is charging a 1% fee per year for the management of assets, the financial advice still has a huge impact on generating additional retirement income (source forbes.com 8/24/14).

A 2011 report by HSBC (The Future of Retirement Global Report- Life after work?) showed that those with financial plans accumulated nearly 250% more retirement savings than those without a financial plan in place.  Furthermore, nearly 44% of those who have a financial plan in place save more money each year for retirement. A qualified advisor will help develop, implement, monitor and update your plan.

Our firm seeks to provide a wide range of services and advice based upon your Personal Vision Planning ™ .   We are happy to discuss the potential fee’s and expense at any time without cost or obligation.   We can then decide if there is a good fit. We are not the right firm for everybody and everyone is not a good fit for us. If it does make sense to work on your own we can help decide that as well.   Once we agree that we should be partners we will work with you so that we both understand what your vision is and then come up with a plan to achieve it.   As with many things the value you receive from working with any advisors is directly related to the information and insight that you provide to them.

We look forward to speaking with you at any time to discuss your personal vision and how we may help you to achieve it.