Financial planning goes beyond investments, taxes, and insurance. Having a plan can provide peace of mind, help clients better understand their cash flow, and give them more confidence when making financial decisions.
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All right, so as financial planners, there’s obviously a relatively broad range of services and things that we are trying to help clients accomplish. Whether it’s estate planning, investment management, insurance, tax planning to a degree. Out of all these different functions and services that we offer to clients, in your personal view, what has been the most impactful thing that you see for clients as a part of your services that you provide?
Well, I think what my goal is always to be is the peace of mind. And for them to know whether things are going well, whether things aren’t going well, they can pick up the phone and call us. And there’s so much in our life that we can’t control, right? We don’t control the stock market. We don’t control taxes. We don’t control if somebody gets sick. And so, what I love our clients to know is that we have avenues and roadmaps for all of the things that could go right or wrong in their lives. And it’s as simple as just knowing I have a plan.
And I think when you do have a plan, your ability to remain disciplined when investing is a lot easier. I think your ability to handle the ups and downs of life, whether it’s grieving the loss of a loved one or selling your business, puts things into perspective. And we love that approach of any sign, anything with a dollar sign or a decimal point, we want you to call us. And in our opinion, there’s so much more than just what we can actually implement for a client that we’re talking to them about. And the other thing that I always share with clients is: everybody talks about generational wealth, but how that wealth is kept is through generational habits. And so, involving ourselves and our team in a broader sense of visiting with multiple generations of family members at once and almost serving kind of like a mediator to help make sure expectations are set. And that way, you can create a system where each generation is doing better than the next one.
Yeah, no, I couldn’t agree more. The thing that sticks out to me, the clients that I see that feel the most confident in their circumstances are the ones that understand their cash flow the best. Not just the amounts, by the way. I think the timing is arguably more important. Just as an example, I was on the phone with a client last night, and they kind of had this number in mind that they were willing to spend for a real estate purchase, primary residence purchase, they’re relocating. Well, they found something that was 20% roughly over what they were originally planning to spend, but we had done a lot of good work on the front end to help them understand, okay, here’s, here are your regular expenses, here are some exogenous things that generally have come up in the past. And then here are your different avenues and the timing for cash flow. And here’s what you need to set aside for taxes.
And they felt really good to be able to write an offer that was timed up well, where there’s a fair amount of cash coming in prior to close. So, they pad their cash back up, knowing that they’ll have to make a larger down payment. But we just have so many examples of clients that I think just live their lives more confidently. They make decisions more confidently because they understand their, their cash flow situation as well.
I couldn’t agree more.