Client Services

Retirement Planning

Whether you are approaching retirement or are already retired, it is essential to have a roadmap to get there and stay there. The decisions you make today will influence your lifestyle for many years to come.

LifeStage Wealth Retirement Road Map

• We sit down with open ears, open eyes and an open mind to help you define your ideal retirement
• We work with you to figure out what money means to you and how it affects your investment decisions
• We help you analyze what life after retirement looks like not only financially but personally
• We make realistic projections about your future and monitor the results
• We use a proven process of investment selection and management

Qualified Plans
Our advisors look at the total picture as it relates to your retirement. We work with you to coordinate your tax advantage plans, including the 401(k), 403(b), and deferred compensation through your employer with your overall investment planning and portfolio in mind. While you are working we are strong proponents of using and funding these plans and we help navigate the many decisions you have with them.

Self-Employed / Small Business Owners
As a self-employed individual or small business owner you have several unique planning decisions to make in regard to your retirement planning. We work with you and other professionals to help design and implement a retirement plan that fits you and your business.

Getting There and Staying There: Income Planning
This is not your grandparents’ retirement. With life expectancies well into the eighties, many retirees have a great concern of outliving their assets. Retirees are more active, so the adage of one size fits all income planning based on a percentage of former income is out the window. LifeStage works with you determine how to turn that paycheck into a retirement check and generate income for your full retirement.

Wealth Management

With so many investment options out there it is difficult for regular investors to sift through the noise of investment products and hidden costs and fees associated with them. We work with clients that may not have the time, knowledge or desire to manage their accounts on their own. We take the complexity out of investing to create a customized portfolio to address each client’s personal goals.

True Wealth Management
We are wealth advisors here to help you deal with financial and non-financial needs. Investing is only one of many financial concerns a client has. We work with clients on asset allocation, credit and mortgages, tax planning, education planning, insurance, estate planning, and other needs that may not fit nicely into the investment box. We are your go-to financial advisor. We work to be there before you know you need help.

Proactive Involvement
As an independent Registered Investment Advisor (RIA), we have a fiduciary obligation to provide investment recommendations that are in our clients’ best interests. We conduct monthly investment committee meetings to review and analyze our current investments and any others we are tracking for possible uses in a client’s portfollio. We don’t believe that the “buy and hold” strategy of hoping your account is higher in the future is realistic. Our job is to diversify risk through asset classes and get ahead of trends. Our commitment is to meet in person at least annually, and call you quarterly, using our strict investment process to take out the emotion of investments which has proven to have a detrimental effect on portfolios. We do not pick “hot stocks” - as independent advisors we search out investments that are best in class with low investment costs.

Costs and Fees
As an RIA, we exercise 100% transparency on our management fees. Fees and expense can have a large portfolio drag causing overall returns to suffer. We use low-cost institutional mutual funds, exchange traded funds (ETFs), individual bonds and stocks, and various alternative investments to structure a portfolio to reach your goals. Unfortunately many investment advisors hide their cost in high cost funds and commissions.

Estate Planning

Estate planning involves the accumulation, preservation, and distribution of an estate in a manner that will most effectively achieve an estate owner’s personal goals, whether it is passed on to heirs or to benefit a charitable organization.

Like it or not, no one lives forever. Although this thought may depress you, safeguarding the future of the people you care about most is one of the most important aspects of financial planning. Unless you develop plans and take steps during your lifetime to accumulate, preserve and distribute your wealth upon your death, chances are that your heirs and beneficiaries will receive only a part of your estate. The rest will go (often unnecessarily) to taxes and various administrative costs.

We help you to determine what types of documents, such as a will, various types of trusts, and powers of attorney, are needed as a blueprint for your heirs in the distribution and management of your estate. We work to answer these questions and others:

• How should my accounts be titled?
• Who should I put for beneficiaries of retirement account and life insurance to minimize tax?
• How can I provide for liquidity of my estate?
• How can I give to charity and still provide for my heirs?
• How can I minimize estate tax?

There are excellent estate planning tools that can help clients accomplish their income and estate tax reduction goals while providing for a legacy that transcends your lifespan. We work with competent attorneys specializing in estate planning or your current attorney to make sure your estate plan is per your wishes.

Tax Planning

Tax planning can become very complex at times and may involve rather sophisticated investment strategies but many are straightforward and fairly simple and can be used by most taxpayers. We know that it does not make a difference how much you make; it is how much you keep after taxes. We utilize sound tax saving procedures through the application of current tax laws and tax-favored investments to minimize a client’s tax liability.

Managing your taxes is a year-round activity. Because congress considers tax law changes throughout the year, tax strategies require review and adjustment throughout the year. We work closely with our affiliated accountants or an outside accountant with whom a client has an existing relationship. Throughout the year, we continuously review your portfolio to consider:

• The effects of dividends
• Capital gains/losses – realized or unrealized
• Placement of investments – whether in taxable or tax-deferred/free accounts

Business Planning

As a small business owner we know what our small business clients’ concerns are. We know you work hard to start, maintain and grow your business and that you need someone in your corner working for you. We work side by side with you to develop or review the factors that are specific in your situation whether it is one or all of the following:

• Retirement plan consideration
• Transfer of ownership
• Risk management
• Business succession

Risk Management

Risk is defined as the potential that a chosen action or activity (including the choice of inaction) will lead to a loss. As wealth managers, our job is to diversify risk.

Investing
Concentrated wealth makes clients wealthy, but diversified wealth keeps them wealthy. Reducing overall portfolio risk is the reason we diversify by market capitalization (large-cap versus small-cap), geography (domestic versus international), investment style (growth versus value), and management approach (passive/indexing versus active).

We work with each individual client to determine their risk tolerance and develop a portfolio to meet their goals. We deploy our active TAP management approach to deliver greater return while minimizing portfolio risk.

Insurance
Whenever you or your family have a financial interest in something - whether it is your life, health, home, car, boat, or job - you face the risk that your budget will be upset or your net worth reduced if that item is lost or damaged. Because of the devastating effect such losses can have on your financial well-being, you must devise ways to deal with risk. You will need an economic way of dealing with those risks and insurance is one way. These are some insurance categories that we evaluate to manage your risk:

• Property casualty
• Health
• Life/Disability
• Long term care (LTC)
• Umbrella policy