The "Map Your Wealth" Process And Pricing
Our planning experience includes a minimum of five meetings and generally lasts three months.
*The "Map Your Wealth" process is extremely thorough. Because of this, we are only willing to partner with a maximum of five new households per month. So we can't just take on anyone is willing to pay us. If you are considering partnering with us, please be in a place in your life where you have the time and the drive to take a deep dive into the Map Your Wealth Process.
First Time Clients
Step 1: Getting To Know Each Other (this part is free)
We email you a Financial Life Priorities Questionnaire for you to complete. This will help you really think through what your top financial priorities are. Don't worry, we won't force you to provide us with any account balances or financial details yet. We then conduct a complimentary video meeting so we can discuss your questionnaire and goals in more detail. We also share our screen so we can provide a live tour of the "Map Your Wealth" experience. This won't be a canned "strategy session" with a high pressure sales pitch at the end. This first connection simply arms us both with more information so we can begin to determine if we might be a good fit for each other.
Step 2: The Decision
After our initial meeting, we will think long and hard about exactly what we would need to do to help you accomplish everything you are expecting to by hiring a financial advisor. We will then send you an official client proposal that outlines those steps and provides the flat free price for the planning engagement. If you decide our services are exactly what you are looking for, great! We will ask you to sign a client agreement and then we will move onto step three. If not, no worries! If you wish, we can refer you to other firms who we think could be a better fit. We only refer to fee-only CFP®s.
Step 3: Organize Your Financial Life
We will provide you with our digital financial organizer. This online tool will make it easy for you to provide us with all of your financial life details. Once you complete it, we will use the provided information to build your own personalized financial portal and electronically sync all your accounts. You will then be able to track your entire financial life 24/7 from any device. We will also use the portal to conduct live planning sessions in the next steps.
Step 4: Review Your Goals And Assumptions
We will conduct a video meeting where we review all the information in your new client portal and take a deep dive into your goals. Often times people sell themselves short and dismiss things as being financially impossible without actually crunching the numbers, when in fact, they are possible. So during this step in the process, we encourgage you to shoot for the stars when it comes to your goals. We also fine-tune other assumptions that will be built into your plan such as future health care costs, vehicle purchases, financial support for children or parents, changes over time to your spending on essentials and travel, changes to your housing situation, and more. After this meeting, we will use all the information we have collected from you thus far, and perform a compehensive analysis of your current and future cash flows. By leveraging this information, and our financial planning expertise, we will then create multiple base planning scenarios which we will then review in our next meeting.
Step 5: Your First Explore The Possibilities Meeting
We will conduct a live video meeting where we share our screen as we update and compare various planning scenarios in real time. These scenarios are comprised of "financial levers". While it is our job as your advisor to know ahead of time which levers are even applicable to you, you get to steer these conversations. Sure, you want to make sure you have a plan so that you don't run out of money in retirement. And we will be able to show you the likelihood of that happening based on the combination of financial levers we are pulling. But we also don't want to sacrifice too much of what makes you happy in the present. Properly allocating your resources towards both is a balancing act and we will guide you through it.
Step 6: Review Investments and Insurance Meeting
Advice-only planning doesn't mean we ignore your investments. Far from it. This is where we determine exactly how you should be investing in any applicable accounts. For any employer-sponsored plans that you participate in, we will ask you to share your screen as you are logged into those accounts so we can review those plan investment choices, fees and expenses, and resources. Based on the plan options we will tell you how to invest in them. For any other investment accounts (IRAs, brokerage accounts, etc), we recommend a specific allocation, as well as provide specific model portfolios comprised of low cost ETFs that align with that allocation. If we determine it makes sense to make any changes to your current portfolios, we will help you process those online or join in on a conference call with your service provider.
We will also discuss what type of insurance coverage you should have, and how much. Don't worry, we don't sell insurance or get paid to refer you to anyone who does. So our advice is completely unbiased. But it is our job to know if you are over or under-insured, and to help you shop for the best pricing when it comes to life, property and casualty, disabilty, personal liablility, and any other applicable insurance.
Step 7: Second Explore The Possibilities Meeting:
After the first explore the possibilities meeting, clients need time to digest everything that was discussed. After all, it can be a bit overwhelming to have your entire financial life mapped out in front of you for the first time. And we would never expect you to make any big decisions about your future lives without sleeping on it. This is especially true if you plan with a significant other as it will be important for you two to discuss everything on your own. Most clients end up thinking it over, and wanting to revise the combination of levers that we are pulling in their planning scenarios. So we conduct another meeting to do just that. The goal will be to ultimately drill down to a single combination of levers that gives you the best chance of reaching your financial and non-financial goals. If after this meeting you feel the need for another one, we are happy to oblige.
Step 8: Your Final Plan Summary
We will create and send you a final plan summary. Nope, this won't be a 40-page book of charts and numbers that you end up using as a door stop. It doesn't need to be that long because even after our planning engagement is complete, you will continue to have free access to your client portal and view all the information we have discussed over the course of our meetings. But our summary will provide an easy to digest review of all of the key planning points.
Taxes:
You will notice there is no separate step for reviewing your taxes. As part of the initial getting organized process, we do ask you to provide a recent tax return (many financial planners don't bother to do this) so that we can review it and identify any planning opportunities. But taxes typically play some kind of role in almost every financial decision you make. So throughout the entire Map Your Wealth Process, we remain constantly aware of how taxes may impact any of the financial levers we are pulling and do our best to help you minimize them as much as possible.
Step 9: Continue to track your financial life and progress towards your goals in your personal financial portal
You will continue to have access to your personalized financial portal. This means you can continue to leverage the budgeting tool, track your account balances and net worth, and even access the planning module to "pull on the financial levers" yourself so you can see the results. Don't forget, you will also have access to your secure digital vault where all your important documents can be safely stored for your loved ones to access in case something happens to you.
$1800 to $2700 Divided Into Six Monthly Payments
Repeat Clients
Should you ever feel the need to review your plan again, you can engage us for another "By The Gig" Plan. Because we already have your entire financial life in your portal, and we are updating it rather than starting from scratch, this process wil ltake less of our time, so the pricing will be 50% less than your initial fee.