Make confident decisions and get your finances under control in 30 minutes a month
Do you feel overwhelmed by the prospect of organizing and planning your finances?
We get it – we’ve been there!
It seems like you suddenly have a lot more issues to manage than you did before. The kids are growing and your parents are planning their estate and retirement health care. You have to make more decisions and they are more complicated. It has moved beyond paying your bills and saving a little each month. You want guidance, but advisors scare you. Maybe you have talked to an advisor but they asked you to think and do so much it drove you away. You just don’t have time to think about all that right now. We understand. We have a more sensible approach.
Field Of Vision™ Financial Planning
Traditional financial planning is insane.
Many advisors start by asking you about your long-term goals. What do you envision for your retirement? Retirement?! That’s 30 years from now! No one knows what life will be like 30 years from now. Or what will happen between now and then.
In the process, other advisors may ask you to do an initial 2-hour meeting and give you 4 hours of homework gathering papers and filling in forms.
We have a more sensible approach
Take advantage of the opportunities you have today
Live the right habits
Manage the risks
Focus on the NEXT goal
By making the most of today and laying the groundwork for later, you can be confident you're moving in the right direction. Better yet, you can do it in bite-size pieces. No difficult, time-consuming process. Just ½ an hour month. In our office or wherever you are. Meet in person or over the Internet. We make it so that you can fit it into your busy schedule.
We are firm believers in planning, but maybe not in the way you have heard it from other advisors. Like other planning professionals, we believe no recommendation – investments, insurance, strategy – makes sense without the context of planning. Recommendations need to come after a discussion of where you are headed and how we have determined to get there. But we also believe that asking you to pick some random numbers now, maybe based on a projection of your current reality, is a poor way to create that planning context.
What IS important – Your next goal
If you make the most of today and have good habits, the next goal is most important. Let’s focus on that and not all the other ones way off in the future.
Every time you reach a goal, you have a much clearer (maybe even different) idea of what the next one should be.
And if you have a process for achieving the next goal, you have a process for achieving ALL your goals.
Will my strategy work long term?
If you make the most of today and (this is important) have the right HABITS, you can be fine. Making steady progress forward. If you make the most of today for each year, from one goal to the next, keeping the right habits along the way, you can be positioned to accomplish what you want. More important, you can do it a little at a time without taking too much time out of your already packed calendar.
We have a straightforward investment discipline. Anyone who tries to sell you an investment because it will beat other investments is giving you a sales pitch that just about every academic study has disproven. We focus on helping you get ahead through your decisions and habits. Here’s what we believe when we put clients’ money to work:
The most important principles in successfully managing portfolios is allocation across asset types and disciplined rebalancing.
The primary goal for each asset class is to capture the performance of that market.
Minimize costs. It is possible that a manager may be able to add some value beyond what the market provides but costs are a guaranteed drag on performance.
More expensive investment vehicles may be worthwhile if there is a tax advantage or guarantee, but costs (including opportunity costs) must be evaluated in the analysis.
Managing downside risk is more important than managing return (because you can’t manage return).
Fundamental to a solid financial plan is mitigating the risks of what could happen along the way. A significant element to Optimize Today™ is protecting against the risks. We will help you make sure you have adequately protected yourself and, importantly, don’t pay too much in the areas of disability insurance, life insurance, and long-term care insurance. We are independent and can work with dozens of insurance companies, helping us make sure we can find the right, most cost-effective way to address the risks you are exposed to.
I have been in financial services over 30 years and what I love most about it is having the opportunity to change people’s lives in a positive way. Finding new ways of accomplishing that is a consistent theme in my career. Earning my certified financial planner designation back in 1991, I learned the traditional way of setting long-term goals and developing a plan to accomplish them. And I always struggled applying it to my own situation.
I have run my own business for most of my career. My life has had its twists and turns. I have been married, had kids, gotten divorced, gotten remarried, and paid unexpected medical expenses to take care of my new family. Thinking far off into the future was a challenge when the present kept changing. It always made more sense to me to focus on the next significant goal than to invest a lot of time envisioning outcomes decades into the future. I had real difficulties motivating myself to draw up a detailed retirement plan even though I had earned a professional designation and knew how to do it!
That’s why we developed Field of Vision Planning. This just makes more sense to me.
The biggest rewards in this career are the times when I can help get a client on a better path, find opportunities they had not thought of, and protect against the risks, and both of us can see the benefits of the work we did. This new approach enables us to focus on that.
I live in Henrietta, New York, with my wife and middle school daughter. My wife retired from a symphony orchestra and now runs a program to bring music into the hospital setting to benefit families and help speed recovery. I love cooking and West Coast Swing. I have two older kids, one who works for Disney in Orlando and another who is finishing medical school.
Helping people is in my blood. I have served as a Stephen’s minister (who counsels those who are hurting or ill) and on a pastoral care team. I have been chairperson of the Franklin County domestic violence Council and been a domestic violence advocate and court watch volunteer. I have taught self-defense to survivors at domestic abuse shelters.
I joined the financial industry in 1997, working with the Kentucky Public Employee’s Deferred Compensation Authority under Nationwide Retirement Solutions and the William M. Mercer Group.
The exposure has given me an appreciation for how important it is for people to make the right financial decisions at the right time. We need to save for the future but we need to make the most of today as well. I have tried to save for the future while raising two sons and now a new daughter. But I struggle with a mother who suffers cognitive decline. We missed the opportunity to put some things in place that would make taking care of her a lot easier. Now that job is a lot more complicated.
I have been supporting financial advisors for 18 years. I graduated from the College of Financial Planning as a Certified Financial Paraplanner Qualified Professional™.
I live in Frankfort, Kentucky with my newly adopted daughter and a husband who has the unlikely combination of experiences in standup comedy, law enforcement, and the military.
What can our planning approach do for you?
Let’s have a 15 minute phone call.
With a few questions, we can give you a pretty good idea of what our approach may offer you.
