We want to provide help providing direction so that your wealth may be preserved. We pride ourselves on helping to minimize losses and building wealth. In order to build, we need to manage your pre-existing wealth and seek to use the correct products and services to take care of it. There are understandable concerns with any financial decision, here we will evaluate that everything is working properly for you.

Estate Planning is of the most important yet misunderstood concepts when it comes to asset protection and financial planning. When any person dies in the United States, they have an “Estate.” The estate of a person is made up of all the assets and belongings that person that person owned prior to their passing. “Estate Planning” is planning and specific strategies that can be implemented to ease the process of asset transfer to someone’s heirs after they die. When someone dies one of three things is going to occur and what occurs solely depends on the amount and type of planning that was done by that person prior to passing away or becoming incapacitated.

The first outcome is if someone does nothing when it comes to estate planning. If someone dies with no estate planning in place the assets are accounted for and accumulated within “the estate of” the person who has died. Any assets that do not list a specific beneficiary will then be brought before the country court in which you live and will go through a process called Probate. Probate is a very expensive and arduous process that can average 6-18 months and involves the county legal system taking account of and processing orders to distribute your assets to those they deem to be the appropriate heirs.

The second outcome is if someone creates a Last Will and Testament also known as a Will. A will is a static document that lists all your assets and directions on how you want your assets distributed after you die. By creating a Will a person does not bypass the Probate process. If someone dies with a Last Will and Testament in place the Estate and all its respective assets will still go through the Probate process. The Will someone creates will only serve as a “guide” for the probate court than dictating document like a trust.

The third outcome is when a Trust is put in place. A trust is an entity that controls where your assets go, when and to whom after you die. A trust also includes advanced directives called Durable Power of Attorney (DPOA) and Patient Advocate (PA) which allows for people you select to make decisions on your behalf if you become incapacitated. A durable power of attorney is a person or person you elect to be able to make business and financial decisions on your behalf and a Patient Advocate is a person or persons that can make medical decisions on your behalf. A Revocable Living Trust is the typical trust structure individuals and families will put in place. A Revocable Living Trust allows for the Grantor (creator) of the trust to make any changes to the trust, the assets and the beneficiaries. A trust also includes a trustee which is a person or persons responsible for ensuring that the wishes and objectives of the trust is applied after the person who created it dies. A Trust also includes guardianship elections and provisions for people who are in the care of minor children.

A trust also has unique benefits including a more seamless transition of ownership for non- beneficiary designated assets like a primary residence, secondary property or land. A trust also provides inherent protections for things like Medicaid spend down as well as protection of assets from creditors, debtors and divorcing spouses of heirs of your estate. A properly designed trust can minimize taxes, avoid probate, eliminate family disputes, control over asset distribution from your heirs and many other things.

When analyzing your specific situation, it is imperative to understand how all these options work and what is going to be best for you and your family.

The investments that you put your money into serve multiple purposes. Your objectives for your money help determine the best option for each of your accounts to obtain their specific goals, whether it’s a mix of mutual funds, etfs, individual stocks and bonds spread among more than one account to accomplish sound diversification. We walk through our investment philosophy with every prospective client early on in the “getting to know you” part of our process to educate investors or potential investors. We are not going to make you an Investment Advisor, but we believe it is important for you to have an understanding of what you currently own and how we break it down into terms you can understand. We continue to research the best fund companies in every different aspect of investing to continually help our clients grow their money and mitigate losses based on each individual’s plan. There is no one size fits all with investment allocation. In the recent past we have seen the “conservative” stronghold of bonds be extremely risky. When stocks and bonds decide to go hand in hand rather than inverse to each other, you have to have an alternative to grow and protect what you have worked for and will need to work for you once you retire.

With fewer and fewer companies offering pensions and defined benefit plans, it’s become rarer and rarer for anyone to have a future income stream that he or she can rely on during retirement. Several financial products, like annuities, provide an investor the opportunity to solve that problem by creating his or her own personal pension.