A Plan for Your Financial Independence.
Work with a trusted advisor and prepare for your financial journey. Ensure that you’re on track to achieving and maintaining financial independence.
What You Can Expect Working with Us
Our financial planning engagements are based on a flat fee and are charged monthly. During our first year of working together, we’ll clarify your life goals, organize your finances and create your roadmap to financial independence. We’ll also meet periodically to monitor your plan, discuss roadblocks, and address relevant action items, including investment monitoring, exercising stock options, dispositioning restricted stock, filing taxes, benefits elections, and year-end planning opportunities to name a few.
Here’s what you can expect during the first year of planning:
Introductory Meeting
Before you sign on the dotted line, we’ll get together for a phone call to talk through your financial situation at a high level and see if our services make sense for your need.
Planning Possibilities Meeting
We’ll get together via video chat to talk through your financial situation at a high level.
Understanding what your money is for is essential to preparing a solid financial plan. During our time together, we’ll talk through your relationship with money, what’s important to you as an individual, and how you’d like to use your wealth to achieve essential life goals on your journey to financial independence.
Before our call, you’ll receive a short survey to help us better understand your current financial situation so we can focus our time together on having a deep conversation that aligns your money with what matters most to you.
Get Organized Meeting
We’ll schedule another call to walk you through our onboarding process. Because our process takes a holistic view of your finances, we’ll ask for many documents. This exercise not only gathers the necessary ingredients to prepare your plan but also allows us to organize all of your financial matters in one location.
During this video call, we will:
- Introduce you to our financial planning software
- Show you how to log in to the secure document vault we use to store your data
- Help you find tax returns, bank statements, and other documents we’ll want to analyze
- Provide you with resources to help track down those documents and where to find them
- Schedule a call to talk about your financial goals in more detail
Financial Planning Meeting
At this point, you should feel excited and confident that you’re taking the first steps toward financial independence.
During this video call, we will:
- Crystalize your financial goals and set tangible milestones for achieving them
- Discuss Critical Questions related to achieving and maintaining your financial independence
- Review your investment risk preferences
- Review your current and ideal lifestyle spending strategies
- Prioritize your savings and debt payoff goals
- Take a final look at the high-level assumptions we’ll use in your financial plan
- Discuss any documents still outstanding and how to obtain them
Strategy Meeting
After some time, we’ll finally be ready to discuss your path to financial independence. This video call is typically longer than our initial calls because we’ll have a lot of ground to cover.
During this video call, we will:
- Show you the likelihood of achieving your financial independence goals
- Talk through what changes need to be made to your spending and savings decisions to make your financial independence goals a reality
- Review what-if and scenario analyses
- Discuss your current portfolio and make recommendations for needed adjustments
- Discuss a trading plan for your equity compensation and best practices for managing equity compensation
- Review overall recommendations to optimize your financial accounts
- Discuss your household cash management plan and how to align cash inflows and outflows best
- Review practical approaches to financially protecting yourself and your loved ones
- Review your twelve-month action plan and discuss next steps for making your plan a reality
Follow Up Meeting
A financial plan has value when it’s actually implemented. We know you’re busy and want to ensure you have a clear plan for implementing our recommendations. We will have a check-in about a month after our last development meeting to check how things are going.
In this video call, we will:
- Review any items we didn’t get to in the initial development phase: it’s common for us to discuss estate planning and life insurance in this follow-up meeting
- Assign tasks to you to improve your overall financial health
- Make sure your investment portfolio is ready to go
Ongoing Meetings
Doing the work is essential to ensuring that you’re on track to mastering your journey to financial independence. We’ll schedule quarterly meetings to review your Action Plan and stay on top of key thematic trends when necessary.
Throughout the year, we’ll meet virtually to review:
- Planning strategies for the upcoming filing season
- Enrollment benefits enrollment
- Year-end planning strategies to ensure that you’re not paying more taxes than necessary
- An annual plan refresh, goal planning, and strategy
- Monitoring of your investment portfolio
- Discuss potential exercise strategies and opportunities as market conditions warrant
What you will receive:
- A written how-to document educating you on your financial options
- An action plan detailing which steps to take in the coming year
- Equity compensation analysis, including stock option exercising and restricted stock trading plans
- Full balance sheet strategy to optimize your assets, liabilities, cash flows and risks
- Scenario-based recommendations that illustrate lifestyle and savings tradeoffs
- Preparing for a big-ticket purchase or family planning and college savings
- A disciplined investment strategy plan
- Retirement stress-testing evaluating potential worst-case outcomes for your savings
- Early retirement needs analysis and post-employment distribution strategies
- Tax minimization strategies including asset location and Roth conversions
- Other customized financial strategies depending on your current circumstances
- Avoid financial blind-spots and keep your money goals on track through access to the FI|Mastery Journey
