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.
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.
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.
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.