Financial Life Planning

Just like the world’s greatest athletes hire a coach to continually make them better, a financial coach will help you eliminate the noise and focus on what truly matters. Look for an advisor with integrity and competence who can be a financial guide through all your decisions, helping you increase the net amount of money received through tax efficient strategies. A good advisor will ensure that all decisions are coordinated with the rest of your long-term financial plan.

A competent advisor will also keep you away from the financial cliff, pointing out blind spots during the decision-making process. This assistance is priceless when you consider the consequences of inadvertently making a bad decision.

In fact, Vanguard released updated research in September 2016 showing that an advisor can add significantly to a client’s net return by implementing a framework of cost-effective implementation, strategic rebalancing, financial behavior coaching, and tax sensitivity in planning, among other items. All of these points are cornerstones to our planning approach, implemented long before Vanguard’s study was released and outlined below.

PLC’s financial planning services include:

—Integrated tax and financial planning

—Investment analysis

—Goals-based planning

—Risk management through insurance review

—Cash flow planning

Planning Philosophy: Beliefs To Stand On

1. Financial planning, at its heart, is about stewardship of the resources we have been given and blessed to manage.

2. Your values should inform your financial decisions.

3. Accumulating wealth simply for the sake of having more money is unfulfilling. Our goal is to help you turn your life of success into a life of significance.

4. A deep integration with tax planning on a year-to-year basis ensures coordination and efficiency across all parts of a financial plan.

5. Financial planning is a goals-based activity. We want to help you accomplish your life goals rather than simply achieve certain investment results.

6. A total-return approach should be indifferent to whether cash flow comes from capital appreciation, dividends, income or other sources.

7. Planning exercises should be based on realistic assumptions and an acknowledgement that future returns from capital markets may be modest by historical standards.

8. Portfolios should be regularly maintained for tax efficiency and optimal asset location whenever appropriate.

9. Cost is a large determining factor of future expected performance, so we look to minimize investment cost as much as possible.

10. There is no benefit to market timing.

11. Factor-based investing based on the research of Fama and French is the way to go, including overweighting portfolios toward value securities.

12. Maintain an agnostic position in the active-passive debate and a willingness to use either approach for asset classes or sub-classes.

13. Asset allocation, not investment selection, is the single most important determinant of investment performance and overall volatility.

14. A written investment policy statement should be used for all investors.