Business Planning, Editors' Picks, Financial Education, Financial News, Financial Planning, Investing in Women, Markets and Investing, Personal Finance, Retirement Planning, Wealth Management, Financial Planning for Small Business Owners, Estate Planning, Tax Planning
Some investors who have worked with a financial advisor and received a proposal before have noted that, while they were given the feeling they were being heard, this didn’t ultimately mean they actually had been listened to.
With an EP Wealth Advisor, our advisors want to develop good communication with you. That means we want to make sure we clearly understand your financial situation, investments, and discuss your personal objectives. We listen for the insights that make your story unique. Then, in our second meeting, we’ll prove how EP Wealth’s Financial Health Assessment is different—by enabling you to see onscreen what we’ve learned and how that translates into your potential future finances.
The second meeting is heavily dependent on the quality of the information acquired in our first meeting. The more insight you have provided your EP Wealth Advisor, the better we can hold this conversation.
We may start the second meeting with a short review of what we learned from the first meeting to make sure we have the proper context to provide objective advice based on your goals. These details can be displayed on your screen—TV or computer—and we can amend them on the fly. You can also see them in paper format. From there we’ll walk through your current financial situation, which may include investments as well as real estate, and share with you a rough probability of your current financial plan’s success. This is based on 1,000 trials in a predictive model called a Monte Carlo Analysis. We can dig into more analysis if need be, or dive directly into our recommendations.
In our recommended scenario, we’ll talk about potential financial recommendations and the allocation of your investments, showing this to you on screen if possible.. We can dig into the impact of market volatility—helpful because it’s highly likely that the market will fluctuate up and down over the course of your investment. This is a reality no matter whom you work with. But by planning for volatility, we can provide guidance on what you can potentially expect to see.
Also, we can model different scenarios here, such as what happens if Social Security benefits change, or inflation goes up, or stock market returns lag.
The key to this part of the meeting is that we can apply the contents of our discussions to your financial plans, so you can have a good idea if you think we are good fit and worth working with.
Regardless of whether you decide to work with us or not, our goal is for you to have better insight into your financial situation after our discussion—it’s why we call this process a Financial Health Assessment. We also aim to help you understand the sophisticated work we would do to optimize your financial planning if you were to hire us. Should you choose to engage our services, while we may advise on the total net worth of your estate, we only charge for the invested assets we manage.
If you’re interested in speaking with us and gaining a better understanding of your finances, please feel free to contact us today or reach out to an advisor through their bio pages.
[FOOTNOTE]
*The meetings referenced here do not represent the sequence, chronology, order, nor are they a guarantee or warrantee, of what every client or prospective client will be offered or provided. Each client is assessed uniquely and the number of meetings and what information is exchanged or presented will vary and will be tailored to the unique needs of that specific client. This is not indicative of the experience every client or prospective client will encounter. Furthermore, EP Wealth Advisors does not mandate that their clients or prospective clients complete a Financial Health Assessment, Financial Plan, or to complete any of the steps referenced here.
Disclosures:
The EP Wealth Advisors financial planning process starts with the relationship between you and your financial advisor. How do you value a financial coach? Developing a partnership that ensures we understand your goals lets us help you prioritize and organize your financial decisions—so you can achieve peace of mind and live your life.
Wealth management tips and news for all people