After completing the Family Wealth Counseling Process Strategy, our clients understand how everything fits together to form one big picture. Our clients have built a Master Life Strategy that they fully understand as well as find exciting, fulfilling, and motivating.

Through our counseling process, our clients become aware of what they want. This enhanced clarity produces greater confidence, which empowers them to effectively take control of the entire charitable/estate planning process. Clients can then discover their own unique talents, accumulated treasures, and increased leverage for their remaining time. This discovery will motivate and fulfill them for the rest of their lives.

 

What makes the Family Wealth Counseling Process Unique?

1. The Financial Aspect of a Family's Wealth

This is the most commonly understood and addressed aspect of family wealth. The financial aspect is all the "stuff" you have accumulated over the years. This can include stocks, bonds, mutual funds, buildings, businesses, personal property, etc. These are the things that you have accumulated through trading your time and energy. Traditional estate planning can be characterized as a series of business decisions that must be made in order to minimize the tax liability.
 

2. The Social Aspect of a Family's Wealth

The social aspect of a family's wealth is often the most misunderstood and completely overlooked aspect. One way of looking at the Federal estate tax is to see it as laws requiring all wealthy Americans, exceeding $5.490 million in 2017, to tax a considerable portion of their family's fortune to the general welfare of the United States through our tax system.

However, very few wealthy families know that there is a choice in how you choose to support the general welfare of our country. You can choose either Involuntary Philanthropy or Voluntary Philanthropy.
Involuntary Philanthropy gives the government the authority to distribute your family's wealth, your Social Capital, as they see fit through the collection of estate taxes.

In contrast, Voluntary Philanthropy allows you to choose to self-direct your Social Capital to the causes and organizations you wish to support - those whom you believe are doing the more good for the most people through estate planning to minimize the impact of estate taxes through charitable gifts.

Being productive in this decision makes the process produce surprising and exciting results.
Question: "If you wrote a check for one million dollars to the IRS or the same million dollar check to your favorite charity, where would it do the most good?"
 

3. The Spiritual/Emotional Aspect of a Family's Wealth

The spiritual/emotional aspect appeals to the heart. This is where the deepest and most profound issues of life are confronted and addressed. This is where we come to grips with what life is really all about. Life is about influence, relationships, and making a difference.

What makes the Family Counseling Process so unique? It is the Family Wealth Counselor's ability to successfully understand and skillfully blend the financial, social, and spiritual/emotional aspects of each family's life into a Master Life Strategy that effectively helps meet the needs and wishes of each individual family.

 

Products & Services

Strategic Financial Partners helps individuals, families, and businesses focus on protection and long-term wealth strategies leveraging the power of earned income in the early years. Financial decisions made in the early stages tend to have the greatest impact on your financial wealth creation future. We strive to get your money to work harder for you. The services we offer assist you in your personal finance decisions. We offer a full array of financial products and services that, as part of your overall financial strategy, can help you achieve your goals.

Conservation/Preservation

We assist you in the design and implementation of programs to help ensure that your wealth is passed along to family or others, without being negatively impacted by estate or inheritance taxes. This service enables you to plan your personal estate to help ensure maximum distribution and conservation to future generations.

Retirement Needs Strategies

Having the ability to retire comfortably from financial pressures remains the main issue for our clients - both business owners and employees. It is critical that the retirement vehicle be properly designed, implemented, communicated, and administered. Retirement vehicles are dynamic, changing as client's businesses and tax laws change. They demand continued and careful analysis, IRS compliance review, and plan administration. The appropriateness of a "qualified" or "non-qualified" plan for any individual is determined based on the individual's existing financial condition, as well as on his or her goals and dreams.

College Funding

We will work with you to tell you if your current savings strategy may cover your child's college expenses. Do you dream of your child or grandchild going to college? Higher education comes with a high price tag but it's an expense you can help meet through proper financial preparation. Let us help you calculate college costs, evaluate funding options, and create an education strategy tailored to your goals.

Options may include:

• State-Sponsored College Savings Plans (529s)
• Education Savings Accounts
• Traditional and Roth IRAs
• Custodial Accounts (UGMA/UTMA)
• Education Trusts

Will/Trust Analysis

Wills and Trusts are just tools in the larger process of "conservation/preservation." There is an unfortunate, widespread misconception that this topic is a subject of interest only to the wealthy. In fact, an estate plan provides the legal mechanism for disposing of property upon death in a way that recognizes your wishes and the needs of your survivors, while minimizing taxes. For many it involves, even more importantly, preparing/arranging for the handling of affairs in case of disability, and the deeply personal medical choices to be made as life nears its end. Conservation/preservation is not just for rich people. Trusts can play an important role in providing order to your financial affairs, assisting with your tax planning, simplifying your estate settlement, and providing guidance for your family and other heirs.

Asset Management

Asset management helps our clients enhance their wealth by maximizing after-tax return with a reasonable level of risk. To accomplish this objective, we integrate active portfolio management with a commitment to after-tax strategies across all appropriate asset classes. We work closely with you to design and manage a strategy that complements your specific investment objectives. Your asset allocation can consist of quality money market funds, well-researched equities, and investment quality fixed income obligations. Asset allocation does not guarantee against loss, it is a method used to manage risk.

Life Insurance Ownership Management

Insurance is an important part of a complete financial strategy. It helps to protect your heirs in the event of your death and it may protect you in the event of a disability. We can help you determine what type of coverage is best for you. We can provide access to insurance products, including term life insurance, whole life insurance, universal life insurance, variable life insurance, survivorship, single premium, long-term care solutions, and long term disability insurance. As you build relationships and share financial information with us, we are in a unique position to provide guidance and help determine which insurance products are right for you.

Long Term Care Solutions

There's a good chance that you may need to pay for nursing home, assisted living, or home health care one day. In fact, more than half of the U.S.. population will require long-term care at some point in their lives (http://longtermcare.gov/the-basics/). Long-term care involves helping you with the most intimate aspects of your life, like what and where you'll eat and your personal hygiene. Unfortunately, this kind of care is expensive. You probably shouldn't assume that Uncle Same will help. Medicare does not cover most long-term care costs. Medicaid benefits are only available to you when you've depleted all of your assets. We will help you protect yourself against long-term care expenses with the appropriate coverage.

Employee Benefits

Providing an employee a benefits package that includes quality, affordable health care coverage continues to be one of the greatest challenges for today's employers. We put our considerable experience in this field to work on delivering alternatives to our clients. We evaluate the design of different benefits packages to achieve the right pricing structure and advice on implementing such options as cafeteria plans that allow for employee cost-sharing through tax deductible contributions.

Buy-Sell Strategies

A buy-sell agreement is simply a written agreement made between the partner or shareholders of the business specifying buy out provisions caused by such things as death, disability, divorce, bankruptcy, voluntary termination, company dissolution, etc. The execution of a buy-sell agreement helps secure a number of tangible benefits for the shareholders, including:

• Continuity of management and control for the remaining owners
• A ready market for typically non-marketable business interests
• Liquidity to the decedent's estate for estate taxes and administration costs
• A fair valuation of the business interest for federal estate tax purposes
• A fair return to the decedent's estate for his/her business interests

 

Business Succession Planning

A key goal of many of our business owner clients is to someday transfer their business interest to either family members or key employees. Properly done, this type of planning can offer to both the current and successor owner a virtually worry free, tax efficient method of business sucession.

Furthermore, the loss of a business owner through death or disability can catch even the most efficiently managed small companies off guard and, worse, unprepared to deal with the repercussions. Family businesses, in particular, are susceptible to erosion of capital due to estate taxes and legal fees; not to mention the possible hurdles of voting control being scattered among heirs, with conflicting points of view impeding the business' operation and growth.

We can provide a professional evaluation of your current situation that will help avoid future problems involved in business succession planning.

Executive Compensation

Non-qualified deferred compensation programs, typically employed to provide supplemental retirement benefits to senior management, include selective incentive plans, wherein the company makes contributions to fund the plan on behalf of selected employees. Executive Compensation plans are a popular vehicle to attract and retain key individuals of your company.

Risk Management Analysis

Implementing a risk management program is fundamental to a company's ability to protect itself against the loss of key personnel through death or disabling injury or sickness. We offer expertise on selecting life and disability insurance coverage for such a program.

We conduct a financial security analysis to determine the appropriate protection for companies and their key executives, which encompasses evaluating risk management needs and balancing them with living or wealth accumulation objectives. We design risk management programs to be affordable, to fill corporate and individual needs, and to be flexible enough to allow for a change as needs change. Our analysis also involves a review of any existing coverage to help ensure it is cost effective and includes up-to-date features.

Through risk management analysis, we can deliver solutions in the form of policies designed to help meet clients' needs.

Managed Accounts

Because every investor is unique, we offer programs that are designed to link your specific investment needs to the appropriate method of professional investment management. We emphasize that each client has unique needs and goals that deserve to be addressed differently. This approach has benefited clients of our firm for many years, and we believe it will remain a successful approach into future decades.