Individuals & Families
Personal Planning
The first step in investing is defining your dreams for the future. If you are married or in a long-term relationship, spend some time together discussing your joint and individual goals. It's best to be as specific as possible. For instance, you may know you want to retire, but when? If you want to send your child to college, does that mean an Ivy League school or the community college down the street? You'll end up with a list of goals. Some of these goals will be long-term (you have more than 15 years to plan), some will be short-term (5 years or less to plan), and some will be intermediate (between 5 and 15 years to plan). You can then decide how much money you'll need to accumulate and which investments can best help you meet your goals.
Accumulating Wealth For Retirement
You may have a very idealistic vision of retirement — doing all of the things that you never seem to have time to do now. But how do you pursue that vision? Social Security may be around when you retire, but the benefit that you get from Uncle Sam may not provide enough income for your retirement years. To make matters worse, few employers today offer a traditional company pension plan that guarantees you a specific income at retirement. On top of that, people are living longer and must find ways to fund those additional years of retirement. Such eye-opening facts mean that today, sensible retirement planning is critical. Many Americans realize the importance of saving for retirement but knowing exactly how much they need to save is another issue altogether. With all the information available about retirement, it is sometimes difficult to decipher what is appropriate for your specific situation.
Managing Wealth In Retirement
You know how important it is to plan for your retirement, but where do you begin? One of your first steps should be to estimate how much income you'll need to fund your retirement. Your specific needs depend on your goals and many other factors. It's common to discuss desired annual retirement income as a percentage of your current income. Depending on whom you're talking to, that percentage could be anywhere from 60% to 90%, or even more. The appeal of this approach lies in its simplicity, and the fact that there's a fairly common-sense analysis underlying it: Your current income sustains your present lifestyle, so taking that income and reducing it by a specific percentage to reflect the fact that there will be certain expenses you'll no longer be liable for (e.g., payroll taxes) will, theoretically, allow you to sustain your current lifestyle. The problem with this approach is that it doesn't account for your specific situation. If you intend to travel extensively in retirement, for example, you might easily need 100% (or more) of your current income to get by. It's fine to use a percentage of your current income as a benchmark, but it's worth going through all of your current expenses in detail, and really thinking about how those expenses will change over time as you transition into retirement.
Managing Risk
Making The Most Of Your Insurance Portfolio
Few people are aware that the life, disability and long-term care insurance policies they purchased as recently as five years ago might be unnecessarily costly or lacking critical new benefits due to the availability of a new generation of insurance products. That's why it's important to regularly review all of your personal and business insurance coverages.
With years of experience reviewing countless complex insurance arrangements, Parview Financial has the experience to evaluate your policy and the strength of the insurance company that is guaranteeing the policy.
Education Planning
Whether you're saving for a child's education or planning to return to school yourself, paying tuition costs definitely requires forethought — and the sooner the better. With college costs typically rising faster than the rate of inflation, getting an early start and understanding how to use tax advantages and investment strategy to make the most of your savings can make an enormous difference in reducing or eliminating any post-graduation debt burden.
Legacy Planning
Estate planning is a process designed to help you manage and preserve your assets while you are alive and to conserve and control their distribution after your death according to your goals and objectives. But what estate planning means to you specifically depends on who you are. Your age, health, wealth, lifestyle, life stage, goals, and many other factors determine your particular estate planning needs. For example, you may have a small estate and may be concerned only that certain people receive particular things. A simple will is probably all you'll need. Or, you may have a large estate, and minimizing any potential estate tax impact is your foremost goal. Here, you'll need to use more sophisticated techniques in your estate plan,
Whether you're seeking to manage your own assets, control how your assets are distributed after your death, or plan for incapacity, trusts can help you accomplish your estate planning goals. Their power is in their versatility — many types of trusts exist, each designed for a specific purpose. Although trust law is complex and establishing a trust requires the services of an experienced attorney, mastering the basics isn't hard.
More Than Money
We believe that legacy planning is not just about preserving your financial assets but also about preserving family relationships. With that in mind, our planning process is designed to help you address your family's personal concerns such as:
- How do I optimize my plan without giving up control of my assets?
- How can we get all of our family members on the same page so that there is less conflict?
- How can I take complex planning techniques and make them understandable for me and my family?
- Are my children's assets preserved from divorce, creditors, etc.?