New Home, Children, Vacations
Your dreams are our goals, and it all starts with financial planning. A complete financial plan lays out your goals and puts realistic budget numbers together for each of them. This way, you can make choices that fit within your plan, including your home, vacations, cars, eating out and other lifestyle options. Children need to be considered, too—the average cost is $233,610 to raise each one—not including the cost of college. Good financial planning can help make your multiple goals achievable, up to and including retirement.
College Education
The cost of college has risen dramatically, by thousands of dollars, and student loan debt is in the trillions in America. But there are tax-advantaged ways to save for and pay for college costs, as well as strategies to help minimize your family’s EFC*, or expected family contribution on the FAFSA (free application for financial student aid). The best way to save depends on your individual situation, but some options include 529 plans, Roth IRAs, life insurance and UTMAs (uniform transfers to minors act). We can include college education expenses in your holistic financial plan.
*The EFC will be replaced by the SAI (student aid index) for the 2023/24 school year.
Breaking Up Goals into Achievable Milestones—On a Timeline.
Bucket Allocations
You don’t just have one goal—you have many, and your goals change as your life changes. As an example, maybe your first goal is to buy a house, your next goal is to have a child, while your long-term goals are to save for college for the kids and retirement. At TFS, The Financial Specialists, we develop your custom financial plans based on individual bucket allocations for each goal. This way you can work toward accomplishing multiple short-term and long-term goals laid out on a timeline with budgets attached to each. We believe this helps make your plan understandable, achievable, manageable—and more inspiring.
Monitoring & Adjusting
Because your life isn’t static, at TFS, we monitor your plan and make adjustments as needed—at least every year. Our objective is to be your source for all things financial so that you have only one call to make. We have multiple specialists on staff as well as outside experts like CPAs and estate attorneys to help with the many different aspects of your financial life. We seek to be your advisor for the long-term—throughout the generations. We are accessible, and we are accountable as your financial partner to help make sure you are on track to achieve your dreams at each phase of your life.
Saving and Growing Wealth During the Peak-Earning Years of Your Career.
Investing
At The Financial Specialists, we help you plan and implement investments to help grow your wealth and achieve your goals in a holistic manner. We always put your financial interests first. Your dreams are our goals, and we want to help you make the most of the accumulation phase of life while planning ahead for the retirement lifestyle of your dreams.
Risk Tolerance
Your risk tolerance, or risk appetite, is your personal level of comfort with market risk—the possibility of attaining big gains, or potentially suffering big losses. It’s our experience that no one likes to lose money, but when you’re young, you have a longer time horizon to make up any market losses that may occur during a down market cycle. Nevertheless, we adhere to your risk tolerance as our guide in your investment choices no matter what your age. As an independent firm, we have literally hundreds if not thousands of investment options we can use for your custom financial plan, including some very conservative choices not correlated to the stock market.
Shifting Risk Away from Your Family.
Insurance
Having the right amount and types of insurance in place is imperative to round out a holistic financial plan. It allows you to hedge the risk of adverse life events and shift the financial burden of potential loss away from you and your family and over to an insurance company. These risks are significant, including the potential not only for loss of life, but for short-term disability due to accident or illness and/or the need for long-term care. At TFS, we conduct a risk-assessment audit for each of our clients, and often recommend a combination of term and permanent insurance to protect you.
