First year with Veritas
Your Veritas Financial Plan is highly personalized and customized to your unique situation, addressing all aspects of your financial situation. We develop a financial plan with you through a series of educational meetings that teach us about you, your goals and your needs. Above all, we understand we must hear a client to know a client; and we must know a client to problem solve for a client.
Our goal is to answer every question and concern through an interactive process that links all the disparate aspects of your financial life into a comprehensible whole. Although we have a set structure for the process, we strive to be sensitive to your needs and can rearrange the order of the meetings to address a pressing issue that requires immediate attention. We also want to demystify the process and guide you toward your financial objectives.
Preliminary Meeting: Before the financial planning process begins, we typically will meet with the prospective client to determine whether a mutually beneficial relationship exists. We consider our relationship with you to be a partnership. As in all partnerships, success or failure depends on the ability of the partners to work effectively together. If both Veritas and the client agree to work with each other, it will mark the beginning of a financial planning relationship.
A comprehensive financial plan will consist of five to six meetings. You can expect each meeting to last sixty to ninety minutes.
Meeting One
Discovery and Goal Setting: The planning process begins with understanding you and your family. Through a series of open ended questions, we develop a set of goals and objectives for your financial life that are unique to you. The insight we gain forms the basis of a customized financial plan; a plan that we implement, then continuously monitor and review in response to changing laws, goals and circumstances.
Meeting Two
Budget/Cash Flow Analysis: We will review your current cash flow situation and help identify where a client’s cash is going each month and evaluate potential opportunities to improve their cash flow through automated savings accounts, tax strategies, and proper debt management. We will also help develop a workable budget for the client.
Retirement Planning: We review your long term cash flow projections. Our goal is to provide you with a firm understanding of how much you need to save if you are pre-retirement and how much you can spend each year if you are already financially independent. We are able to create multiple “what if” scenarios so that you also understand how changes in the assumptions impact the long term. For example, you might want to understand the consequences of early retirement, buying a second home, or gifting annually to each of your children or grandchildren.
Education Planning: We provide you with an analysis of the cost of educating your children or grandchildren and discuss the most effective way of funding this goal.
Meeting Three
Investment Strategy: We review the basic tenets of proper portfolio management. Our goal in this session is to assist you in deciding how much risk you wish to take with your investments. We also present you with an initial analysis of your current portfolio.
Investment Planning: We will make specific recommendations for how to invest the funds in your portfolio giving due consideration to short and long term goals, income tax impact of choices, cash flow needs and cost of implementing recommendations.
Investment Policy: We will review a set of written guidelines for your portfolio(s).
Meeting Four
Risk Management: We will review your various insurance policies from home/auto to long term care to life insurance. We will comment on the quality and cost of the existing coverage as well as make recommendations for termination or additional coverage where necessary.
Scenario/Sensitivity Analysis: We will review and test your financial situation against several “worst case” scenarios, including disability, premature death, and long term care events. We will look at how these scenarios could adversely impact your financial plan and make recommendations for how to mitigate these risks.
Income Tax Planning: We will review your current income tax return with you and when possible, make recommendations as to how you may save income taxes in the future.
Meeting Five
Estate Planning: We will review your current estate plan with you to confirm that it meets your goals and objectives for your family. If changes are necessary, we will work closely with your estate planning attorney to implement these changes. If you need to engage an attorney, we will assist you in selecting the appropriate individual to work with you.
Charitable Giving/Philanthropy: We will learn about your unique charitable giving/philanthropic objectives and assist in evaluating various giving techniques designed around these objectives.
Business Succession/Executive Compensation: If you have special needs related to business succession and/or executive compensation, we will review and make any necessary recommendations surrounding these issues.
Meeting Six
Plan Review/Statement Review: We will review your first quarterly portfolio reports with you. The goal of this meeting is to review the format of these reports and answer any questions you may have.
How Are We Doing?: We want your feedback on our progress to date towards your initial goals and any recommendations you have as to how we might improve our process or service.