Frequently Asked Questions
What are your core services?
Our core services are advisory services and asset management for our clients. Financial planning is offered as part of our advisory service.
What are your areas of expertise?
Retirement planning – we are familiar with Federal, State, and San Diego county pensions. Long-term goal planning – for younger clients we assist with prioritizing long-term goals and provide a retirement reality check. Financial organization – for all clients we like to help them review and organize their financial lives. We also try to act as a referral hub for professional resources that they may need.
Who do you work with?
Our clients tend to come to us from a variety of backgrounds: Engineering, Government Service/Military Service, Small Business Owners and increasingly the adult children of our good clients. Many of our prospects are referred to us as they begin to think about retirement – maybe about 2-5 years before they want to retire.
What is unique about what you do?
We are a small personal touch firm: Our fees are low, our customer service is very personable, and we do not have a lot of boiler plate. Our services are geared towards accounts of $500,000 in investable assets or more. For younger households, a commitment to saving and planning takes precedence over account size. Regardless of assets, we offer a complimentary initial meeting to see if we are both a good fit for each other.
What are the challenges that you overcome for clients?
We help them to see the big picture with regards to retirement planning – how their ideas about retirement (age, Social Security, living expense goals), plus certain recommended goals that we suggest such as health care related expenses in retirement come together to create a financial plan that we hope will see them all the way through retirement.
How do your clients describe those challenges?
As reminders and support for helping them to do the right thing.
Describe the solutions you provide to overcome client challenges:
We frequently help clients by either confirming that their desired monthly retirement living expense can work or by determining a recommended a monthly retirement spending amount for clients. We also help younger clients and those who have started late to determine average annual savings goals. We also review estate planning, life insurance, and long-term care needs. Sometimes the solutions that we provide include physically driving clients to the professionals that they need to meet with.
What are the benefits to working with you?
Retirees: We help you to manage your assets and can, through the use of automated bank transfers, help you manage your withdrawals from your accounts with us. For IRA accounts, we can set up federal and state tax withholding on distributions and help you to make sure that you have taken your IRS required minimum distribution each year. We also act as a sounding board to any additional withdrawals that you wish to take from your accounts with us that may not be accounted for in your plan.
Pre-Retirees: We can help you to make sure that you are on track for retirement. We help you to prioritize retirement age, living expenses, and fun goals such as travel along with necessary ones such as retirement related health care costs. We help you to realistically view your long range retirement plan out until age 92 to 100, estimating taxes and inflation, reviewing survivor pension benefits and analyzing Social Security claiming strategies. We can assist you with adjustments to your plan/goals prior to committing to a retirement date such as increased savings (i.e. working a year or two longer), recommendations for debt reduction, or tweaking investment plans where the current mix is either too aggressive or primarily in cash.
Adult children of good clients: We can help you to lay-out your long-term goals and add in reasonably realistic retirement goals to help you to put the future into perspective. We can help with creating college funding and retirement savings goals, debt reduction plans to handle student loans, credit card debt, help with financial education in general – investment terms, spending plans, insurance, estate planning etc. We can manage help you to keep track of all your investments using our financial planning tools – both the ones that you have with us and elsewhere. We can manage the investments that you have with us, review your plan with you at least once a year, and hopefully help you to keep on track with your goals.