What is wealth management?
How do I save for retirement?
What is the best way to invest my money?
These are common questions people ask when planning for their future. At Solid Rock Wealth Management, we help you take a comprehensive approach to your financial life
Money means different things to different people. Each of us has different dreams. You may want to achieve financial freedom so that you never have to work again—even if you plan on working the rest of your life. You may want to make a top-flight college education possible for your children or grandchildren.
You might want to provide the seed capital that will give your children or grandchildren a great start in life, whether that’s with a home or a business. You may dream of a vacation home on the beach or in the mountains. Or you may have achieved tremendous success throughout your career and want to leave behind an enduring legacy that will enable your favorite charity to continue its work.
Whatever your dreams are, you need a framework for making wise decisions about your money that will help enable you to achieve all that is important to you. Chances are good that you have a wide range of financial goals, as well as diverse financial challenges.
Common sense tells us that such a broad range of issues requires a broad, comprehensive outlook. It’s for this reason that most affluent clients want their financial advisors to help them with more than just investments. They want real wealth management—a complete approach to addressing their entire financial lives.
As you’ve probably noticed, many financial firms these days say that they offer wealth management. The trouble is that many of these firms just provide investment management and offer a couple of extra services—such as college education planning and estate planning—and call that wealth management. So the challenge for anyone who wants help addressing all his or her financial needs is finding a firm that provides true wealth management.
We define wealth management as a formula: WM = IC + AP + RM
- Investment consulting (IC) is the astute management of investments over time to help achieve financial goals. It requires financial advisors to deeply understand their clients’ most important challenges and then to design an investment plan that takes their clients’ time horizons and tolerance for risk into account and that describes an approach that will maximize clients’ probability of achieving their goals. It also requires financial advisors to monitor both their clients’ portfolios and their financial lives over time so that they can make adjustments to the investment plan as needed.
- Advanced planning (AP) goes beyond investments to look at all the other aspects that are important to your financial life. We break it down into four parts: wealth enhancement, wealth transfer, wealth protection and charitable giving. In our experience, very few financial advisors offer these services.
- Relationship management (RM) is the final element. True wealth managers are focused on building relationships within three groups. The first and most obvious group is their clients. To address their clients’ needs effectively, they must foster solid, trusted relationships with them. Second, wealth managers must manage a network of financial professionals—experts they can call in to address specific client needs. Finally, wealth managers must be able to work effectively with their clients’ other professional advisors, such as their attorneys and accountants.
Our focus in this Wealth Guide will be on the first element of wealth management—investment consulting. But keep in mind that managing your investments is just one part of a comprehensive approach to your financial life. At the end of this guide, we’ll describe what you should expect from a true wealth manager so that you can make an informed decision when choosing which financial professional to work with.
Let’s turn now to our discussion of the concepts that can make you a more successful investor.
To view the complete Wealth Guide titled: The Informed Investor, click here