In its broadest terms, wealth planning is the long-term process of wisely managing your affairs so you can achieve your life's goals. Through our "wealth coaching" process, Bolen | Dodson & Associates will help you define your aspirations and negotiate the financial issues that inevitably crop up in every stage of life.

          The process involves setting goals, examining your current financial status, creating a plan for accomplishing what you want, and then following through. Sounds simple enough - just common sense - but too few people do it. This is not incidental stuff. A person who plans ahead is much more likely to get where he or she wants to go, financially and otherwise, than the person who doesn't plan. 

          As Life | Wealth Coaches, we will help you identify what is important in your life and help you prioritize your goals. Working with a Life | Wealth coach improves your odds of success. We will help you bring the focus of your life from the distant future back to the present. Don’t settle, be inspired. We will help.

          Financial solutions are meant to support your life goals. Topically, we will cover the following aspects of wealth planning in the order of most urgency to you, including:

• Retirement Planning
  Will I have enough to live on in retirement? Includes discussion of resources available versus expenditures to meet your life goals, qualified plans, pensions, savings/investing options, social security, etc 
  

• Estate Planning
  Is my estate in good order and will it go where I want after I pass on? Includes discussion on wills, trusts, living wills, powers of attorney, taxes, and multi generational family issues  
  

• Investments
  Is my portfolio constructed to meet my short and long term goals? Would you know if it were? Includes portfolio review, appropriate asset allocation, investor/risk profile determination, and investor education as desirable  
  

• Business Succession Planning
  What are the best options with my private business when I want to slow down? Includes discussions on buy outs, family dynamics, employees, etc 
  

• Education Planning
  How much do we need to save for children and/or grandchildren’s college? Includes discussion of 529 plans, public versus private schools, grants, aid, etc  
  

• Risk Management
  Do I have the right types and right amounts of insurance? Includes discussions of life, health, property and casualty, long term care, and disability, etc 
  

• Tax Planning
  How can I minimize taxes now and later? What are my options? 
  

• Debt Management
  Do I have too much debt? Not enough? Appropriate debt levels are not always black or white, but shades of gray. How comfortable are your regarding your debt levels?
  

• Charitable/Philanthropic Giving
  Do I have enough resources to give some away? What are my choices?  
  

As your trusted advisor, we work with clients to coordinate the advice you are getting from various sources, including insurances agents, lawyers, tax preparers, etc. Bolen | Dodson & Associates looks at the pieces in an integrated fashion, across financial disciplines, optimizing the combined result from the client’s perspective.   

Sound financial planning isn't much fun, yet it is critical to a future free of debt and doubt. Planning sees you through your golden years in style. The sea-worthy financial ship depends on maximizing employee and retirement benefits and fully planning for retirement and the passing of one's estate. It depends upon sound investments, minimizing taxes and adequate insurance. Bolen | Dodson & Associates will discuss each of these with you to assess their relative importance to your specific situation. 

Build your assets first, and let the assets do the work, rather than you. Remember the movie "Pay it Forward" with Kevin Spacey? The movie's premise is to do a good deed for someone in advance, and ask him or her to "pay it forward." We take the same concept and apply it to retirement planning. For example, take one vacation this year and pay forward the second one to a future date, or pay forward your new car a few years. Simple compounding will let you buy two cars down the road, or take three vacations later, with the same funds, grown over time, that you would spend today. It's not delayed gratification, which nobody likes.  It's just paying it forward - getting more bang for the buck - which everyone loves.