Wealth encompasses all parts of your personal and business or farm life, not just what’s in your investment portfolio. It’s everything you’ve accumulated: your home, cottage, business or farm, investments and other property.
Managing all these assets requires the advice of multiple professionals — accountants, lawyers, investment advisors, realtors, bankers, mortgage brokers, insurance agents, financial planners, estate planners and more.
Advisors often work in isolation from each other. This can result in conflicting and sometimes incomplete advice, leading to bad financial decisions made in isolation of a person’s overall financial objectives and needs.
The reality is that while most people have an investment plan, an insurance plan, a tax plan, and maybe even a business or farm succession plan and/or estate plan, these plans were likely done at different times by different advisors not working collaboratively.
The result is a collection of investments, insurance, business, farm and trust structures that are fragmented and may not be tax-efficient, resulting in missed opportunities and unnecessary expense, unforeseen tax liability, duplication of obligations and at worst, catastrophic consequences.
Rather than trying to make sense of the sometimes conflicting advice from these various professionals, families with complex financial assets, business owners and farm families can benefit from taking a holistic approach to managing their wealth by hiring a wealth advisor.
Your wealth advisor co-ordinates all the services and consultants required to manage your wealth and help you plan for your family’s current and future needs.
Wealth advisors start by developing a plan that will grow and protect your wealth based on your personal financial situation, goals, comfort level, risk tolerance and needs.
This type of plan would include:
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- An investment plan to manage your investments;
- A risk plan to manage the risks to your wealth and livelihood;
- A personal tax plan to manage the tax implications of managing your personal wealth;
- A family, business or farm tax plan;
- A family wealth transition plan;
- A business or farm transition plan to plan the transition or sale of your business or farm to your children or new owners when you retire in a tax-efficient manner; and
- An estate plan to transfer your family assets to the next generation tax-efficiently that also meets your wishes on who gets what and how.
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Once all these plans are created, wealth advisors work with your network of professionals, or their network of professionals, to implement the various components of your plan. They then meet with you regularly to review and monitor your plan’s progress.
The plans are revised and updated when needed. Wealth advisors touch every aspect of your wealth from growing it, protecting it and transferring it to the next generation.
Wealth advisors can be financial planners, investment advisors, insurance advisors, accountants and even lawyers. The key is that they take on the wealth advisory role on behalf of their clients.
They have built a network of professionals who provide complementary services, such as Accountants, Lawyers, Bankers, Realtors, Business Brokers, M&A Firms, Insurance Advisors, Investment Advisors, Financial Planners, Business and Farm Transition Planners and Family Therapists who understand Family Farms and Businesses.
So how do you find a Wealth Advisor that can offer all the services mentioned above?
Good question!
I cover this extensively in my book Who’s Investing Your Money? – 7 Key Questions to Ask Your Financial Advisor. This book examines the various types of advisor registrations, their limits and abilities and will help you find the right advisor for you.
You have worked hard to achieve what you have. Make sure that you hire the right wealth advisor who comes with a family business or farm aware wealth advisory team.
To learn more about how a Wealth Advisor can better help you, please call me at (604) 855-6846 or email me at aspitters@pfcwealthsolutions.com
Who’s investing your Money? is available as a free PDF download at www.whosinvestingyourmoney.com
Alternatively, the book is available from Amazon.ca as a paperback and Kindle version from this link: Who’s Investing Your Money? – Amazon
