Reversing Corrosive Forces
The financial services industry has traditionally handled its customers on the piecemeal, transactional basis. This approach carries risks for its customers. Key factors that influence your net worth can be neglected or mishandled, unleashing corrosive forces. Often unseen, these corrosive forces attack the personal balance sheets of sophisticated investors as well as novices. Whether you take an active role with your investments or delegate heavily to your existing advisor, chances are your net worth is being eroded relative to its potential.
Integral’s fact-based process helps you isolate corrosive forces and gives you a plan to correct them:
- unnecessary income taxes
- underperforming investments
- exorbitant or unnecessary fees
- emotional investment decisions
- misunderstood risks
- uninsured catastrophic events
Diligent Fact Finding
Does your financial advisor really know you? Does he or she have a solid handle on your financial affairs? Compensation incentives for advisors are skewed towards selling investments, rather than assembling detailed profiles on their clients. As a result, some advisors’ fail to obtain sufficient factual and background information to fully understand your circumstances. If your advisor is not fully informed, he or she may inadvertently provide misguided advice or recommend ill-suited investments, both of which can be corrosive to your net worth.
Prior to dispensing any advice, Integral invests the time to develop a detailed diagnosis of your current financial situation. We do this by gathering and verifying up to 230 separate data points, that can include your previous tax returns, wills, insurance policies, current investments etc. Beyond statistics, we get to know you as an individual. Your financial priorities are simply an extension of your overall values and priorities.
We make it our business to understand how your health, family status, marital status, career changes, and other life events are influencing your outlook on life. Financial goals are personal, but can include funding your children’s or grandchildren’s education, supporting elderly parents, building wealth to fund retirement, buying a cottage, succession planning for the family business, or tax-efficiently transferring assets to family members or charitable causes. We help you identify these goals and prioritize them by attaching numbers and time lines.
Financial Scorecard + Net Worth Forecast
Utilizing sophisticated tools, Integral synthesizes your financial data and background information to develop a financial scorecard. The scorecard takes in to account variables such as your planned income and expenses, inflation, health care costs, the projected value of your investments, the tax cost of your investments, the target date for your retirement, and your evolving tax profile etc. It lays out how your current and anticipated financial resources can be utilized to meet your immediate needs as well as your long term goals.
The scorecard allows us to generate a forecast of your future cash flow and net worth position. We produce two scenarios. The first is a projection of your future financial life, assuming historical decisions are left unchecked and your existing portfolio remains unchanged. The second scenario projects your position assuming your financial affairs and your investments are structured in a cohesive plan that Integral has tailored for you. This plan is tax sensitive. It addresses the trade offs between investment risk and return. It also identifies uninsured risks to which you may be exposed.
What does Integral’s cash flow and net worth forecast tell you? It gives you unbiased answers the tough questions that nag all of us;
- "Will I have enough to retire in the lifestyle I seek?"
- "Am I paying unnecessary tax?"
- "How have I been doing with my investments relative how I could or should be doing?"
- "Am I being too conservative or too aggressive with my investments?"
- "Are there any ‘wins’ to be realized from doing some basic tax planning?"
- "Are there any unintended consequences from financial decisions I have made in the past?"
- "If something were to happen to me, will my intended beneficiaries get my assets?"
- "I am exposed to any risks that could come out of ‘left field’ and damage me financially?"
Integrated Expertise
Integral’s wealth management advisors provide you with more than just investment recommendations. We help you maximize your overall financial position by developing and executing a cohesive plan. Without the benefit of a cohesive plan overseen by an advisor who can direct relevant expertise where needed, facing life events, (expected or unexpected) can be stressful and costly. Few of us have much experience in dealing with retirement, sale of a business, divorce, elderly care, loss of a spouse, inheritance, etc. These issues can be emotional-charged, complex and often demand specialized expertise in the areas such as:
- Tax planning
- Trusts
- Investment management
- Performance measurement
- Health care
- Risk management / insurance
- Inter-generational wealth transfer
- Charitable planning
- Business ownership succession
In cases where a specific issue demands third party expertise, Integral advisors maintain a network of top specialists. Our advisors takes a consultative approach that brings both third party and internal expertise in to the decision making process. Given the complexity of today’s financial world, no one can know it all. Your interests are best served by an advisor with the acumen to collaborate with and direct other financial professionals, as required.
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