Our Services to create a solid plan
Financial Planning
“You can have anything you want but you can’t have everything you want”
S. Fussell
Our approach to financial planning is a bit different from the standard view. How can we maximize your current situation to live your best life right now? We do not subscribe to scrimping, saving and suffering for 50 years in hopes for a nice retirement someday. We believe you can have it all right now if done right; our goal is to maximize your own fulfillment. We find clarity in recognizing what is not important and eliminating these costs from our lives.
Many times, this means taking a very honest look into your finances to determine whether your money is being spent on the things that you most value. We are aware that life may push us to spend our money in ways that we do not consciously intend, however, we believe that success can be found by realizing these areas and being more intentional about our decisions.
We use the latest financial planning software to generate all customized financial planning and reporting. The data and planning that we collaborate on helps us to see where your money is going.
Here is a breakdown of how we do financial planning:
- Create a balance sheet allowing us to see where your wealth is and identify any debts
- Review titling of assets and beneficiary instructions to see the flow of your assets to spouse or children
- Helps you recognize opportunities regarding where to put future savings
- Financial modeling to see how your cash flow can support you and your goals
- Identifies where your money is going and implements changes if needed. This is all driven by a bottom-up goals approach, not a top-down mandate
- Customized to your level of granularity. Some individuals prefer to know only if they are within their monthly spending goal, while others like to know where every penny is going.
- Goal based planning and modeling that is flexible as your life and goals change
- College planning
- Scenario analysis for various retirement goals such as spending, finding a retirement date, gifting to children, and giving to charity, for example.
Investment Management
“The stock market is a device for transferring money from the impatient to the patient”
Warren Buffet
At Evergreen Retirement Planning, we custody all client assets at Charles Schwab for peace of mind and transparency. You will always know exactly where your money is using their latest, secure technology. In addition, you will receive monthly statements and secure online portal providing full transparency.
We believe in passive index fund investing, which is essentially owning the various stock markets as a whole and keeping costs low, rather than using actively managed stock pickers. The latter method often increases cost of investment and underperforms the indexes that we can buy directly.
We also believe that you will be successful if you save your money consistently, put those savings mostly into appreciating assets, and stay invested through all markets. Ingraining good investor behavior and keeping investment fees low is far more impactful than trying to time the markets and choosing the right actively managed fund.
Once we find the right balance of stock, bonds and cash investments for you, we provide you with the option to choose from either our standard investment portfolios or our more socially and environmentally responsible investments. In order to minimize taxes, we own slightly different types of investments in non-retirement accounts versus in retirement accounts.
- Ongoing investment management and rebalancing
- Tax-sensitive investing for assets in personal and trust accounts
- Tax-loss harvesting
- Municipal bond investments
- Socially Responsible investment management
- 529 College Savings
- Concentrated positions
- We have the flexibility to build around any existing large, concentrated positions that you wish to continue to own