Investors Mosaic

CAN YOU EXPLAIN THE PROCESS OF A COMPREHENSIVE FINANCIAL PLAN?

A comprehensive financial plan serves as the foundation of a proper wealth management plan. It's importance is derived from both the self-discovery process and the aggregation of financial information during the engagement. At the front-end of the process, we focus on deeply understanding your personal values, your life's goals and dreams, your relationship with money, and what life / financial issues you hope to solve with wealth management & financial planning.

Once we understand your unique story, we then transition towards capturing your financial information to construct an accurate and in-depth assessment of your current financial resources and developed a robust plan to optimize these resources to maximize the probability of achieving your life's goals and dreams. Information we gather includes: salary, investment assets, savings, home equity, insurance policies, expenses, and debt. This information allows us to outline your current Net Worth (assets - liabilities) and determine what levers we have to optimize and grow your wealth.

Once the self-discovery and information gathering process is complete -- which usually takes 3 meetings and a few follow-up emails and calls -- we draft a financial plan based on your uniques circumstances and present our analysis and recommendations in a separate meeting. In this meeting, we elicit your feedback and refine the plan as appropriate. Once these changes are incorporated into the plan, both you and your wealth advisor commit to this plan as your "financial roadmap". Importantly, your plan is a "living and flexible" document that will change as your life circumstances change. We ensure that your financial plan is up-to-date through bi-annual meetings (every six months).

After a comprehensive financial plan is committed to, we begin the very important steps of implementing the plan. This is where we conduct a lot of "heavy lifting" via portfolio rebalancing; retirement plan changes; cash deployment into return-generating assets; adjust savings rate and personal expenses; make necessary changes to insurance policies; set up 529 Plans and funding strategies; execute debt pay down or refinancing; and any other items outlined in your financial plan.

The "heavy-lifting" component of a financial plan usually takes 6 - 12 months, because the items are sequenced in terms of importance, impact, and timeliness.  So certain tasks need to happen before we can execute subsequent elements of the plan. Also, since there are several moving pieces, which can be overwhelming for clients if not managed properly, we intentionally segment the financial plan into small, manageable tasks in order to keep you engaged, feeling a sense of progress, and keeping stress levels down!

Once the heavy-lifting is complete, the process becomes less time-consuming, yet just as powerful. Since we front-load the most important and impactful items, these benefits begin to accrue immediately and repeat year after year. For example, properly allocating your investment portfolio between stocks and bonds, and locating those investments in the most tax-efficient account to maximize your total return, many people can enhance their annual investment performance by 1% or more. This single task can pay for your financial planning & wealth management fee!

Since we have built our service model with a focus on repeatability and client retention, we have automated as much of the wealth management process as possible, meaning that once we execute a task, our software and technology platform enables these elements to run continuously and seamlessly in the background. The whole point of paying us to help you manage your wealth is to optimize your financial resources, reduce stress in your life, and save you time. We invest in and utilize a software and technology platform to deliver this promise.

FINANCIAL PLANNING & WEALTH MANAGEMENT SEEMS VERY INTANGIBLE TO ME. CAN YOU PROVIDE CONCRETE EXAMPLES OF WHAT I GET?

We truly empathize with you in your quest to understand what really is financial planning & wealth management. Do I need it? Is it worth the money? In full transparency, we struggle in properly communicating the value of our services because of the intangible nature of our offering. Therefore, we are happy to help demystify and explain financial planning & wealth management.

Elements addressed in a Financial Plan:

• Life Goals and Dreams

• Income & Expenses

• Net Worth Tracking

• Risk Tolerance Assessment

• Debt Pay Down & Refinance Strategies

• Education Expense Assessment & Planning

• Emergency Fund Strategy

• Insurance Review & Policy Recommendations

• Retirement Planning

Elements of Wealth Management (which is driven by the financial plan):

• Investment Management

• Asset Allocation

• Asset Location

• Rebalancing

• Tax Loss Harvesting

• Asset Protection

CAN YOU PROVIDE DETAILS ON YOUR SOFTWARE & TECHNOLOGY PLATFORM?

We believe wholeheartedly that software and technology can provide substantial benefits in making wealth management and financial planning more consistent, efficient, and cost-effective. We take an "Amazon-like" mentality to our business, mimicking their pursuit in using software and technology to deliver a superior customer service. We embrace technological change, viewing it as an opportunity to automate time-intensive tasks that don't benefit from human involvement; reducing human-induced mistakes and emotional biases; and delivering a service at a lower cost to more people. Below is a list of the software and technology we use to enhance your experience and financial outcomes:

CAN YOU PLEASE DESCRIBE YOUR PRICING PHILOSOPHY?

At the end of the day, we are trying to align our pricing with the value we bring to clients. We believe that working deeply with a client -- comprehensive financial planning and on-going wealth management -- maximizes the impact and value of our services.

Why?

Because financial planning and wealth management is a continuous process, where an intelligent plan that is monitored, maintained, and refined will accrue substantial financial benefits over the life our our relationship. A very large portion of the value we can bring to a client is making sure that the financial plan is implemented, because a great plan is worthless if it's not executed upon. We believe that one of our primary responsibilities to you is providing structure, support, and encouragement to execute the plan and optimize your financial resources.

Therefore, knowing how we can add the most value to clients, we spend most of our time and resources attracting and working with our target clients. This manifests itself in a few ways. First, being aware of the positive financial impact we can have on a person / family with sufficient salary, assets, or complexity, we charge according to that value. Secondly, we strive to maintain an exceptionally high level of customer service -- via ease-of-access, ease-of-use, high-quality advice, cultural fit, and unwavering integrity -- we our capacity constrained in terms of how many clients we can properly serve. So we intentionally limit the size of our client roster to ensure or values and standards are meet.

But this means that we need to be appropriately compensated in order to sustain our business and continue providing high-quality financial advice to people. We have set our pricing accordingly, knowing that we'll attract certain clients where the cost/benefit makes sense, while "turn off" prospects that either don't meet the thresholds we outline or simply don't value our service offering. In marketing parlance, this is called pre-qualifying clients. An important goal of our website is to clearly outline who would and who wouldn't benefit from our financial planning and wealth management offering. We don't want to waste your time if, ultimately, you will determine that Investors Mosaic s not the right for you. And, selfishly, this improves the likelihood that prospective client that reaches out to us is going to convert into a client.