Financial Planning

Objective and Comprehensive Advice

Planning is important. It’s a valuable life lesson and a crucial way to move closer to what you’d like to achieve for yourself and your family.

A solid financial plan serves as an important guide to help you make good decisions, measure progress, handle the expected and unexpected milestones as you go through life, and determine if you’re on track along the way. At Savant, we’re serious about helping you define your vision and goals, and working with you to pursue them.

We start by performing an objective and comprehensive review of your financial situation. Similar to an annual physical with your doctor, our advisors first diagnose your situation before writing a prescription. Through Savant’s proprietary Ideal Futures Financial Health Assessment SM, we review and prioritize which aspects of your financial situation need attention first and then formulate and propose optimal planning strategies. This process helps us determine if you are using all the financial strategies and tools available. It also helps you more closely align your decisions and assets with your goals.

Financial Planning

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Your Ideal Future

10 Key Planning Disciplines

Our proprietary assessment and process covers ten key financial planning disciplines. This doctrine provides an objective and comprehensive review of your current state. It helps prioritize what aspects of your financial situation need attention and formulate optimal planning strategies within each discipline.

Savant’s Ideal Futures Financial Health Assessment℠ serves as a diagnostic tool to identify if you are leveraging all the financial strategies and tools available. This unique process ensures a holistic view of your entire life, and every aspect is considered in your overall evaluation. It identifies needless risk and helps you prioritize the most important opportunities to closely align your decisions and assets with your goals.

Health & Wellbeing

The state of your health and wellbeing can impact whether or not you reach and enjoy your goals. Identifying risks related to disability, along with your mental and physical health, helps build a plan that can illustrate strategies to support your wellbeing now and in the future.

Retirement Planning

Without a well-designed retirement plan, it may be challenging to maintain your lifestyle in retirement. Designing an appropriate retirement strategy involves reviewing savings, income sources, and cash flow and optimizing distributions from your investment portfolio (if already retired). By formalizing your retirement plan, you can gain clarity to determine if you are on track to live the retirement you want.

Risk Management & Asset Protection

If you don’t have appropriate insurance, you may not be efficiently protecting the people and things that are important to you. Maintain an appropriate amount of insurance by regularly evaluating your needs, policy types, coverage amounts, beneficiaries, and other factors to help ensure you are protected when you encounter obstacles and detours on the way to your ideal future.

Debt Management

Debt can hinder you from achieving your long-term goals. While debt can be a prudent financial tool, it can cause significant financial distress if not properly managed. With a strategic plan, you can understand how much debt you can afford, how to use debt in a way that is tax-efficient, and ensure that the terms and rates are appropriate for your financial situation.

Education Planning

If putting your children or grandchildren through higher education is important to you, you’ll want to take advantage of all available education planning strategies while you’re balancing saving for retirement. An education plan helps you assess how much it may cost in the future and determine the best ways to fund this expense in a tax-efficient manner.

Income Tax Planning

Tax advice is not the same as professional tax preparation. Tax advice involves working with a knowledgeable advisor to proactively look for strategies designed to minimize current and future tax liabilities. Optimizing your tax situation is an important part of a well-designed financial plan, assuring you pay no more taxes than you are legally required to pay.

Investment Planning

A sound investment strategy assures you make sufficient returns to meet your goals while not taking excessive risk that can cause needless anxiety. Specifically, a well-executed investment plan reviews the appropriate amounts of risk, builds an optimal portfolio allocation, mitigates taxes, benchmarks performance, understands overall costs, and assures proper liquidity.

Charitable Planning

An optimized giving plan will help you leverage your charitable giving to create impact for the organizations and causes you care about. Being deliberate with your giving can assure your philanthropic strategies align with your values and goals, while also maximizing opportunities to reduce current and future income and estate taxes.

Business Planning & Succession

If you’re a business owner, your business plan should be optimally integrated with your personal financial plan. The two plans should be aligned so that both are working together toward achieving your long-term goals. Your business will likely impact all the other areas of your financial life, so coordination is critical.

Estate Planning & Administration

If you die without an estate plan, your family may end up paying needless tax and legal bills, while your estate becomes a matter of public record. An estate plan assures that your assets are distributed in a manner that perpetuates your values, protects your heirs, reduces or eliminates estate taxes, diffuses family conflict, and makes the administration of your estate simple for your family.

Please Note: Limitations. The scope of any financial planning and consulting services to be provided depends upon the terms of the engagement and the specific requests and needs of the client. Savant does not serve as an attorney or insurance agent. Savant does not prepare legal documents, nor does it sell insurance products. If the client engages us to do so, Savant can provide tax preparation services as discussed in Savant’s written disclosure brochure ADV Part 2A (see website footer) per the terms and conditions of a separate engagement and fee.