Fall Forward into Financial Planning
As the warm summer nights give way to cooler temperatures and the green leaves begin turning autumnal, our minds naturally turn to more indoor activities such as watching football, drinking pumpkin spice lattes and … financial planning. Wait, financial planning?!? Yes, this is the perfect time to start thinking about your goals for the next year, the next three years and the years beyond.
But wait, you might ask, what is a financial plan? A financial plan is nothing more than a guide to help you set your goals and prepare a path to achieving them. Can someone do that for themselves? The answer to that is, yes, a financial plan can be created by anyone who has the time and discipline to map out their financial future. All that’s needed is clear information on your assets, liabilities, insurance coverage, taxes, investments, retirement plans and estate plans. Simple, right?
Right! However, most people would rather play armchair quarterback than financial quarterback. There are a variety of reasons why people find it hard to plan. They think financial planning is the same as retirement planning and only needs to be done later in life. Or, they don’t want to think about incapacity or death, and financial planning requires some thought about uncomfortable topics.
Another common hurdle is believing financial planning only covers retirement or only covers investing when a comprehensive plan actually covers all of the areas listed in the previous paragraph. Or, they simply don’t know where to start. This is where a financial planner and professional financial planning software can come to the rescue.
At Allen Trust Company and Allen Capital Management, we work with a wide range of clients on their financial needs. If you have thought of it, we have probably already worked on a similar challenge with another client. We provide services such as retirement spending analysis, trust fund depletion projections and investment cost scrutiny while helping our clients work towards their financial goals.
With financial education, certifications and training across the board, we have the professional objectivity and perspective to help you make tough financial decisions without letting emotions get in the way. We encourage in-person conversations whenever possible to discuss financial dreams and fears. There is simply no better way to learn from our clients what they want and need to accomplish for their future goals than to hear it directly from them.
While personal interaction provides the foundation of our financial planning efforts, we use professional financial planning software to provide the hard data necessary for decision making. Using this software package we are able to gather all available client asset information to run multiple trials and define potential outcomes for various scenarios, otherwise known as Monte Carlo simulations. We can work collaboratively with you to tweak and modify your goal timeframes, projected asset amounts and level of importance in real time. Having your financial information held in one place is also one more way we can help simplify your financial life.
What about the bottom line? We provide fee-only fiduciary services for our clients. This means there are no hidden fees, and we act solely in the best interest of our clients, minimizing the potential for conflicts of interest.
Allen Trust Company / Allen Capital Management can help you with questions regarding financial planning. If you are one of our clients, or would like to be, please contact us at (503) 292-1041 or via email at allison@allentrust.com.