Wealth management and financial planning can seem like intimidating topics, especially if you don’t have prior experience with the process, or if you’ve never tried setting financial goals for yourself.
With the proper guidance, wealth management can empower you to make informed and effective decisions, regardless of your life stage, or specific financial goals.
Let’s start with the basics: What is wealth management and what makes it so valuable?
What is wealth management?
The main purpose of wealth management is to grow, protect, and preserve your financial assets.
On a more personal level, you can look at wealth management as a service that helps you realize your financial dreams. Some objectives are very common, like building enough wealth to be comfortable in retirement or transferring assets to family members when the time comes. Others are much more individualized—you may want to open a business, purchase a second home, mitigate tax burdens, or fund the education of a loved one.
No matter what you want to do with your assets, wealth management emphasizes financial planning and building strategies for spending, saving, and investing your money to meet your goals. Ultimately, we want our customers to feel like they can embrace their future without financial doubt.
Wealth management professionals leverage their experience and knowledge to provide you with relevant and useful financial advice. They can also identify opportunities that help you reduce financial risk. Wealth management advisors consider your circumstances, relevant regulations, investment options, best practices, and past experiences to support you on a deeply personal level.
Do it yourself vs. working with a partner
Managing your wealth means positioning it to grow in the future, as well as protecting it by mitigating risks. If you don’t work with a financial professional who can guide and inform your planning efforts, you may be missing out. Our goal is to make your money work for you.
Having a professional guide you through a thoughtful discussion is an important first step, and one we’re happy to take with you. We’ll look to understand your tolerance for risk, how you are currently allocating your assets, and your spending and saving habits. We provide you with a suite of useful tools, calculators, illustrations, guides, and more to help you understand various scenarios, and help you make the best decisions for your individual situation. While some of these things can be done on your own, it’s not always easy, and takes a considerable amount of time. Building a plan without thoughtful research and up-to-date information can increase your risk and alter your timelines for reaching your goals.
When you decide to incorporate wealth management into your financial plan, you need to select a team of knowledgeable and experienced professionals that prioritizes your financial needs as an individual. Look for providers that emphasize a client-centric approach, focusing on educating you, developing sound plans for spending and saving, and creating an investment strategy for the long term. We prefer to build long relationships with our customers, which often means we remain in constant contact. Because we know you, our recommendations are bound to be highly personalized to your individual goals.
The best wealth management advisors take the time to develop relationships with their clients. This process allows them to provide customized service that aligns with your unique situation. General guidance and the implementation of recognized best practices are certainly valuable, but taking individual circumstances and goals into account can lead to more positive outcomes. Plus, by continuing to invest time into your relationship with us, helping us stay abreast of major changes in your life, we can help you update and improve that plan as time goes on and your priorities shift.
Who needs wealth management services?
In short, nearly everyone can benefit from some type of service related to wealth management. The most important question is: Which options best support your needs, now and in the future?
A comprehensive wealth management plan, incorporating financial planning, investment management, retirement planning, tax planning, asset allocation, and estate trust services, is most relevant to high net worth individuals or families. Without a certain level of assets, these services may not strongly connect with your personal needs. But every investor, even those at the beginning of their journey, can benefit from helpful planning and good advice.
For example, financial planning can provide the information, context, and suggested course of action needed to start growing and protecting your wealth. In this way, financial planning is a foundation on which to build a more sophisticated plan later in life.
Once you address basic needs, like creating a budget that addresses your financial responsibilities and directs funds toward your preferred investment strategy, you can start improving on that structure with other financial management services offered by our wealth management advisors.
To get started with your wealth management journey, you can use our Personal Financial Planning Guide. This booklet reviews a variety of common needs related to financial planning and supports the creation of your own personalized strategy with worksheets, information, and guidance. You can have a more fruitful conversation with your wealth management professional when you have a clearer picture of your goals and preferred methods of reaching them.
Adirondack Trust: Your wealth management partner
Adirondack Trust’s Wealth Management team is committed to serving your best interests.
Our client-centric approach to wealth management means we take the time to consider your unique circumstances, building a relationship that supports more informed decision-making and a brighter financial future.
To learn more about the advantages of working with a highly qualified, locally oriented, and individually focused wealth management provider, get in touch with our team today.