Financial Planning Process

Vantage: Step by Step

Nobody likes being left in the dark, especially when it comes to their money. That’s why we like to explain how our financial planning process works. Our disciplined approach allows us to customize our advice to your goals and aspirations. We discover what is most important to you and create a plan that allows you the peace of mind to live without worry.

Discover

Establishing a Relationship
Where do we start? We’ll spend our first meeting getting to know you and your goals and aspirations. Understanding the purpose behind your dollars allows us to customize a financial plan that is unique to what matters most to you. We’ll share our advising philosophy and process and what you can expect to gain from starting a relationship with us.  

Gather Data, Set Goals
Earning your trust is how we design the most well-rounded plan possible. That’s why we’ll always be honest, candid, and transparent with you. We will need access to things like tax returns, wills, trust documents, account statements, pay stubs, insurance policies, investment statements, or employee benefit records to ensure that we have a holistic picture of your current financial situation. From there we will work towards understanding your financial concerns and risk tolerance in order to develop a clear vision of your goals. Don’t worry about coming in with everything figured out – our job is to make sense out of all of this and establish a clear path for the future or develop a road map for success. 

Plan

Analyze
After analyzing all your financial information, we identify where your strengths and weaknesses lie and use them to design a personalized financial plan to reach your goals. Together, with a team of investment and finance professionals, we work towards determining whether those goals are feasible. If they're not, we will reassess, reprioritize, and make adjustments until we have a plan that works for you.

Create
Next, we present our recommendations whichmay include tax strategies, asset allocation,  planning for the unforeseen, money management tips, legacy planning – whatever they are, you can bet they’ll be part of a plan tailored specifically to you and your financial situation. When you leave this meeting, you should have a clear understanding of the path we’re taking and which parts of the plan are our responsibility and where we’ll need input/support/guidance from you. And because financial planning is a fluid, dynamic process, we document the plan for future reference and develop a system for regular check ins.

Implement
We’ll decide how to implement your plan. If you decide that you want some additional help from attorneys or other professionals, we'll set a plan of action to get them all on the same page.

Live

Implementing the Vision
Finally, we'll set up a system to implement and easily monitor your plan. Over time, we'll likely want to make adjustments, especially when the economy, market, or taxes fluctuate, or when your personal or financial situation changes. Fortunately, we make this part easy by taking the stress of difficult decisions off your shoulders. Through regular check-ins and collaboration with other professionals such as attorneys or accountants, we ensure your goals are tended to in a proactive, ongoing process.