Are you in touch with your dreams for your life? Have you translated that vision into measurable goals? A comfortable retirement. Providing for your children's or grandchildren's education. Sustaining your family's legacy. Planning for a new business venture or passing on an existing business to the next generation.
Maybe you see a future need to care for elderly parents or to provide indefinitely for a child's special needs. What are the obstacles to realizing your dreams?
BKD Wealth Advisors offers personalized wealth management solutions through a defined process including identification of your life objectives, financial goals and challenges, proper management of your financial resources, identification of new opportunities, effective cash management, investment management, tax-efficient education funding and the formulation of wealth transfer strategies.
Where do you want your financial plan to take you? Do you have a clear understanding of the steps necessary to get there and the obstacles that may be in your way?
Creating and maintaining a solid financial plan involves several steps.
- Establishing goals
- Gathering data
- Analyzing and evaluating financial status
- Developing and implementing the plan
- Monitoring and adjusting as necessary
Our advisors combine their experience as financial planners, estate planners, portfolio managers, tax professionals and insurance consultants to help. Whether you are developing a new financial plan or evaluating the progress of an existing one, our advisors can guide you through the process.
Will you be financially independent when you retire? Will your invested assets be capable of maintaining your standard of living and allow you to pursue your interests and activities?
Your advisors will work with you to determine your future needs. Together, we will project and plan for various scenarios, considering the following:
- Current assets
- Planned savings
- Realistic returns on investments
- Inflation
- Other sources of income
- Current and future expenditures for fixed obligations and variable costs
Retirement marks a new, exciting chapter in your life. We are here to help you prepare.
Have you ever set a budget for your family? How well did it work? How often was it revised? How long did it last? Most people have the best of intentions when developing personal budgets, but quickly become frustrated by the time required to manage the budget or the changes and constraints implementing the budget makes to their spending habits. Part of the problem revolves around personal tendencies toward spending readily available cash in your pocket or checking account. Another factor is the inclination to cover living expenses before funding savings.
More than just balancing the checkbook, cash management includes using credit wisely and keeping the income tax burden to the lowest level possible. By properly managing your cash flow and adopting a different outlook toward budgeting, you can begin your journey to financial security.
Wealth Advisors professionals can help you determine where and how you spend your money and then help you develop a plan to control discretionary spending to build your financial nest egg.
Because virtually every financial decision you make has tax implications, strategic tax planning can make a big difference in your financial affairs. With our access to BKD, LLP's CPAs and other wealth planning partners, you will have the resources of the 10th largest CPA and advisory firm in the country at your fingertips. We call this coordinated approach WealthPlan. Working together, we can help implement tactics consistent with your objectives, such as strategies to defer income, use tax advantaged investments, reduce and transfer values for estate/gift purposes and convert ordinary income into capital gains.
If you are currently paying for your child’s college education or have a recent graduate, you know what a college education costs. Maybe you have a goal of pursuing additional education for yourself. If college costs are in your future, you might be surprised by the price. Over the past decade, college costs have been steadily increasing.
Our advisors can help you estimate the cost of a college education and work with you to select the best methods for funding it. Strategies may include tax-deferred savings, gifting plans or use of tax credits and incentives.
A well-crafted estate plan is made up of two distinct yet inter-related parts; a plan for the passage of your assets and the documents that will put your plan into effect, both while you are alive and at your passing. Our professionals will work with you and your legal counsel to develop a comprehensive estate plan that considers all aspects of your financial situation.
When considering estate planning there are many solutions, including:
- Annual and lifetime gifting programs
- Revocable (living) and irrevocable (permanent) trusts
- Charitable planning and trusts
- And more
Each individual’s situation is unique, involving your family, business and legacy. Our discovery process will help you arrive at specific goals to be achieved through the identification of proven estate-planning strategies implemented with well-crafted documents.
You are regularly faced with questions about, and decisions to be made, relative to a wide range of insurance issues:
- Health
- Life
- Disability
- Long-term care
- Personal liability
The cost of protection and the form it takes are important considerations that relate to achieving your goals. It has been said that insurance is a necessary evil but an important one. The decisions you must make are an important part of your overall wealth management plan.
Simply put, your investment plan must be based on how it can help you achieve your goals for the present and the future. Investments are not an end in themselves; they are a means to an end-an end that you, with our assistance, will define. We can:
- Measure your risk tolerance
- Define your investment opportunities-personal as well as tax qualified
- Recommend an appropriate asset allocation
- Prepare a personal Investment Policy Statement
- Recommend specific investments that will implement the Investment Policy Statement
- Regularly review the performance of selected investments
Depending on your personal desires, philanthropic gifting can be an important component of your estate plans. Just as planning lifetime gifts can result in income tax savings; proper estate planning for charitable gifts can achieve your philanthropic goals and enhance your estate tax savings. The use of charitable trusts and private foundations can add benefits to your overall estate plan, in addition to increasing the funds available for gifts.
There are many different types of charitable-giving techniques and choosing the most suitable can be complex. We can outline the advantages and disadvantages of each option and help implement the charitable-giving strategy that fits your overall estate plan.
