FAQ

Yes, this is our primary service and one of the top reasons why our valued clients choose our firm.

Our ideal fit client is five years away from retirement. Although we have clients who are younger, the folks who are likely to value our services, the most are approaching the transition from their working years to their post-working years and want to know whether they are on track or off track to make a successful transition.

Yes, entitlement claiming decisions are key to a successful retirement plan in our opinion. Knowing how and when to coordinate Social Security claiming strategies with a spouse, and how to avoid unnecessary Medicare surcharges known as income related monthly adjustment amount (IRMAA) is typically a key component of our overall planning process.

We help the folks that we serve evaluate their pension options so that they can make the best decision for their household, and we also guide them through the process of 401(k) rollovers so that they can avoid making irrevocable mistakes.

We are not licensed to provide tax advice, but we do provide tax planning as part of our comprehensive retirement planning process. We will likely highlight opportunities that in our opinion would be smart decisions regarding the long-term impact of taxes on your overall retirement. However, we will insist that you seek tax advice from a qualified professional, and we have relationships with certified public accountants who serve many of our clients.

We feel An estate plan to effectuate your wishes at your passing is another key component of a well-rounded written retirement plan. Although we are not attorneys ourselves, we have relationships with attorneys and estate planning services who we frequently refer our clients to in order to finalize their estate plan in coordination with her overall written retirement plan.

During your discovery visit, we answer your questions first to the best of our ability, and then share a little about our company, philosophy and the PT5 Retirement Plan Screening process. You’ll get to know our team better, and we’ll get a better understanding of how things are for you today relative to what you would like them to be in the future. We also collect the necessary documents for us to do our due diligence when preparing your thorough retirement plan analysis. We set aside 60 minutes for your discovery visit.

A good fit call is a no cost telephone or zoom visit where one of our team members will listen to your questions, and strive to get a clear understanding of what you’re hoping a financial planner might do for you. With your permission we will share a little bit about our company, philosophy, and planning process so that you have a better understanding of what it looks like to engage with our team. The good-fit visit gives us both an opportunity to determine whether or not you would be a good fit for the type of work that we do, and how we serve folks who have become clients of our firm.

There is a one-time initial planning fee of $2,400 for our PT 5 Retirement Plan Screening process. This includes a discovery visit, and a comprehensive analysis of your existing retirement outlook. After a thorough analysis we strive to identify any potential threats to your ideal outcome, any plan inefficiencies, and missed opportunities. We also develop a series of action steps that can be considered, and stress test them in our financial planning program. At that point if you choose to engage with their firm beyond our analysis, we will strategize with you and refine the action plan together before beginning the implementation of the action items.

We take safeguarding your personal information seriously. We use encrypted email, use a password and two factor, authentication, protected programs, and secure document storage services. Your personal identifiable financial information is confidential and only accessible by our authorized team members.

All you need to bring to your initial good fit visit are the questions that you were seeking answers to you, and what you were hoping that a financial advisor relationship would bring to you. If we mutually agree that it makes sense to progress with a discovery visit then we will supply you with a cover letter, explaining what the experience will look like, and a complete checklist of all of the documents that will be necessary for us to collect in order to complete our due diligence and a thorough retirement plan analysis.

Here’s a little more information about your discovery meeting:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeDqTMHjUts

Our firm seeks long-term relationships with folks who want us to guide them to and through retirement. Our financial planning process is not a race, it’s a marathon. However, the initial discovery and analysis steps of our process will usually take a couple of weeks to complete. The timeframe depends on how quickly you can gather the documents that we require to do our due diligence and provide them to our team. Once we have everything that we need, we ask for at least one week to thoroughly prepare a comprehensive analysis. If it takes longer to get the documents that we need then the process will typically take longer.

We require that our financial planning clients visit with us at least one time per year, but more frequently if necessary. Financial planning is not a crockpot, we don’t set it and forget it and walk away. Regular reviews allow us to strategize with you as life unfolds, and, your priorities change. Many of our clients elect to meet with us more frequently than once per year and that is perfectly acceptable.

Once an action plan is drafted and agreed-upon together we begin implementation. Some action steps may take place sooner rather than later, while others may be years in the making. We work together in order to engage the action steps necessary to get you from how things are today to how you would like them to be in the future or taken. As your guide to and through retirement, we strive to hold you accountable, as well as ourselves, in an effort to ensure that the implementation of the action items is complete so that you can retire with purpose on time.

We believe that every dollar has a purpose, and every dollar has a timeline. The purpose and timeline (PT) should determine where assets are positioned. We also believe that financial products and investment strategies are tools to be used in the pursuit of an overall objective. Certain tools are better than others at accomplishing specific tasks, and it is up to us as professionals to identify the tasks that need to be accomplished and then grab the right tool for the job. We may be likely to introduce you to investment strategies or financial tools that you’ve never heard of either because other financial professionals are not familiar with them, or they do not align with the compensation model of the financial institution.

We strive to immunize our clients’ inflation-adjusted lifestyle from market risk by positioning their financial resources in such a way that they can absorb a market downturn that could potentially last a decade. This seems to allow our clients to ignore short-term volatility in the market and see inevitable market downturns as an opportunity rather than a threat.

It seems that ESG, or environmental, social and governance, investing has become popular over the past decade. Who wouldn’t want their investment portfolio to align with their values? However, many financial institutions promoting ESG investing to attract investors have fallen under scrutiny recently due to the fact that many ESG strategies have breached their fiduciary responsibility to investors by placing ideological values of the firm over the best interest of the investors. Many large financial institutions have abandoned their commitment to ESG investing in recent years as a result. While our firm does not have a specific focus on ESG investing, if an individual investor would like to avoid investments in a particular company, or particular sector of the market, our investment team is willing and capable of honoring that request.