WE HELP OUR GREAT CLIENTS IN ALL STAGES OF LIFE
Pre-retirement
Jimbo, a young adult, is a few years into his new career. He was gifted stock from his family and, for some reason, is paying a large tax bill on his investments each year. He also has some annuities and is unsure what he is paying in fees.
After careful review of his finances, we discovered his old advisor performed horribly since they were focused on chasing only yield. We were able to sell many of his investments and actually generated a tax loss.
We also increased his expected return even though we reduced his risk.
We discovered he had a huge gain in one mutual fund, so we did not sell it. Instead, we were able to make his mutual fund less expensive and worked it into his portfolio so he did not get a giant tax bill.
We reviewed his annuity and discovered he was paying over three percent in fees. We were able to roll his annuity into a transparent annuity that does not pay commissions.
"Jimbo learns what he really has so he can take action towards a better future"
Jimbo, now middle-aged, is a big-shot CEO, is unsure what he is doing in his retirement accounts, confused about his future cashflows & compensation packages. He also has several NJ investment properties he is worried about.
After a review of his employer retirement investments, we provided him with recommendations that reduced the cost of his 401k investments, increased his tax breaks, and reduced his risk.
We reviewed his compensation agreements and showed him his projected cashflows and how he can best grow and protect his wealth.
We discovered the current 529 he was using was costing him a fortune, so we helped roll him into a new low-cost 529 plan that we did not directly manage, nor did we charge him a fee.
We let him know that he had the right idea in selling some of his NJ investment property to diversify. We helped him find a passive vehicle that allowed him to do a 1031 exchange to shelter some of his taxable gains.
"Jimbo is able to organize, reduce costs, and diversify his wealth"
Retirement
Jimbo is planning his retirement date. He is unsure if he should take his current pension offer and when he should begin to take social security.
We discovered his employer pension was better to keep "as is" rather than a lump sum payout. To take the lump sum he would need to earn over 8% a year that was risk free, to match his employer's deal, which just is not possible.
Since he has longevity in his family and his spouse planned to work for the next few years, it made sense to hold off on collecting the social security benefits. Delaying social security helped reduce taxes and get a better payout in the future.
After reviewing several future scenarios, he had an almost 100% chance of success in achieving his goal if he retired now. There was no point in waiting unless he was still in it for the love of the game.
"Jimbo can finally relax and splurge a little on spending. He knows it does not jeopardize his retirement"
Jimbo is fully retired, has done really well in the stock market, and is starting to feel generous.
We discovered that Jimbo is way too aggressive in his investments. We presented him with the results of a portfolio stress test. We showed him that in order to recover from a potential 50% loss, you would need a 100% return.
He was amazed that some longer-term treasury bonds that he thought were safe could lose more than 20% of their value if interest rates went up. He never heard of this before.
We also came up with some gift-giving strategies that helped him reduce his estate and avoid taxes.
"Jimbo discovered risks he didn't know he had and took action to avoid unwanted surprises"
Getting Back On Track
Jimbo introduces us to his retired friend, John. John feels that he has missed out on the stock market rally. He is too afraid to invest at the current stock market levels.
We told John that we do not sell insurance products, and we showed him the actual costs of being in these products and let him know that most of these guarantees are rarely used. We also let him know there are counterparty risks, so nothing is truly risk-free.
We were able to find him publicly traded funds that provided a specific outcome that could offset as much as a 30% stock market decline in a year.
We also showed him some of the downfalls of capping his investment returns in insurance products. We let him know that these products do not pay a dividend, which provided over 40% of the stock market's historical return. John was amazed and decided he was okay owning some stock at lower prices.
We had him lock in commitments to buy the stock market at a lower price. In exchange, he was able to earn an equity-like return without directly owning stock.
