The Benefits of Wealth Management

Christopher L. Sassone, CFP®, CLTC®, Financial Consultant/Investment Advisor

If you’re accustomed to managing your own assets or working with various professionals to handle different types of assets in a piecemeal way, tracking your financial life may be somewhat stressful.

And while making a change can be daunting, choosing to work with a wealth management firm to oversee your entire financial life can offer you a number of benefits. Here’s a look at four of the most important benefits that wealth management can provide.

Setting and Reviewing Goals

Before you can achieve goals successfully, you must first have a clear picture of what you’re trying to achieve. While setting financial goals is crucial, it’s also a delicate process. Setting the right goals requires you to think about what you want and need in the future, and how your finances can affect those goals—and vice versa.

A wealth manager can guide you in creating realistic and manageable goals for your future, ranging from short-term goals for the next year or five years, to long-term goals for the next 20 or 50 years. Creating the right goals is essential for creating a wealth plan that will work for your situation.

And because your situation and your needs are always prone to change, a wealth manager will also take time to review your goals with you periodically. These reviews give you a chance to gauge progress and reconsider your objectives based on your life circumstances and preferences.

Professional and Proactive Guidance

With your specific goals in mind, a wealth manager will develop a wealth plan to help you reach those goals. This plan won’t just include your investable assets; it will include all your assets, such as your 401(k), IRA, brokerage accounts, income and bonuses, stock options, inheritance, real estate and other assets.

Once a plan is in place, it’s never set in stone. Rather than setting up your portfolio and forgetting it, wealth managers regularly review your portfolio in light of current events and your changing plans and goals. Through regular reviews, analysis and updates, your wealth manager will provide you with active oversight of your investments, as well as strategies and solutions that will help you get closer to your goals.

Throughout the process, your wealth manager will implement strategies to diversify your portfolio in a way that will match your individual risk tolerance. As your risk tolerance changes over the years, he or she will adjust your portfolio’s diversification to make sure it continues to match your appetite for risk.

Davie Kaplan’s Team-Based Approach

Because wealth management is a holistic approach to your financial life, it usually involves working with more than one professional. For example, to manage your finances appropriately, you may need the services of a Certified Financial Planner™, Certified Public Accountant, estate lawyer, banker, and other professionals. The best wealth managers will work as a team member with the other financial professionals you need or be able to refer you to other trusted advisors as needed.

At Davie Kaplan, CPAs work directly with CFPs® in all aspects of a client’s wealth management and planning. By working together, we strive to integrate considerations from both professionals to maximize the value provided with proactive wealth management and tax efficient advisory services.

Preparation for Retirement

A wealth management plan can help prepare you for retirement, and when you reach retirement, it can continue to help you manage your finances.

For example, many people struggle with the transition from the accumulation phase of their careers to planning for income as the retirement years approach. With an experienced wealth manager, those conversations happen organically and as goals change when retirement nears, the plan is altered to meet the new goals of turning retirement savings into retirement income. At Davie Kaplan, when we help clients make that transition from accumulating income to planning for income in retirement, our advisors look at both a client’s assets and tax bracket, taking a holistic look from a tax perspective. However, we don’t wait until retirement age to start discussions; these conversations happen long before retirement to make sure individuals are prepared financially.