When Should You Think about a Financial Advisor?

9/1/2020

When we all started our careers, our choices were fairly simple:

• Don’t spend more than you make.
• Use the company 401(k).
• Start saving a little on the side for purchases.

As we got older our lives got busier and suddenly our choices got more complicated.

Juggling marriage, kids, education, housing, insurance, and investments, to name a few.

It’s around this time that we start to realize that our decisions will impact our family’s future.

Friends, family, and financial news offer advice. Yet everything you read or hear conflicts with new information you come across. How do you proceed?

A good financial advisor will listen to your questions, experiences and fears. They will help unpack your financial life and take inventory of what you have accumulated thus far. After learning about you and your aspirations, they will create a new roadmap that will help you reorganize, streamline, and prioritize your financial life so as to increase the probabilities of reaching your goals.

Do all financial firms operate in the same way?

At the start of the last century, “financial advisors” were typically agents who worked for a firm that sold financial products and services for commissions. Their duty was to the company they worked for and their responsibility to clients was to match them with products that were “suitable”.

The problem with that standard was that “suitable” set a very low bar in regards to finding the best match for a client’s needs.

Fortunately for the public, the advisor standards have changed greatly since the last century, and more advisors (not all) are held to a “fiduciary standard”. This fiduciary standard mandates that the needs of the client supersede those of the advisor. In layman’s terms, the advisor can only provide services and suggest investments that best match the client’s situation.

There’s also a disparity in the range of services provided by firms. Some firms only offer solutions tied to investments and / or insurance. Other firms offer canned plans that offer many graphs but little guidance. Many of these plans are reviewed, then forgotten.

At Planning Capital Management, we offer true wealth management. We combine investment oversight with financial planning, all of which are reviewed and updated on an annual basis.

We view financial planning as a navigational tool to aid our clients in reaching their goals. We view investments as the engine which pushes our clients towards those goals. Finally, we utilize reviews as opportunities to uncover, update, and review pertinent data critical in our clients’ journeys toward their end goals.

Planning Capital Management Corp is a Registered Investment Advisor with the SEC, and we are held to a fiduciary standard with all of our clients. We offer full financial planning in conjunction with investment advice and portfolio management. Should you have any questions or concerns about current market conditions, or just general financial planning questions, you can reach us at: (215) 709-5100 or info@planningcapital.com.