When you leave our office after a visit with us, a large fellow named Luigi “The Gallbladder” Manicotti will be waiting for you at your car. You can “settle up” with him.

 Just kidding. How we get paid depends on what service we’re providing. If we’re managing your investments, we have a management fee, calculated as a percentage of what we’re managing. That fee is simply debited from your investment account on a monthly basis.

If we’re helping you with anything in the insurance realm (life insurance, Medicare supplement, annuities, etc.), then we’re paid a commission from the insurance company.

This almost never works well, for a few reasons.

For one, to truly do comprehensive planning for you, we need to be able to see the whole picture. If we’re relying on you to send us snapshots of what’s happening with your money somewhere else, we’re never going to be able to efficiently guide you on the full picture.

 Second, most of our clients aren’t just looking for advice, they’re happiest when we’re also able to provide the execution of that advice. Contributions, withdrawals, tax withholdings, buying and selling investments, etc. If we’re able to handle all of that for you across all of your accounts, your life will be much easier.

Finally, this gets even messier if you have two different advisors. You might be getting conflicting advice from different parties, not necessarily because one advisor or the other is wrong. It might just be different strategies that would both work on their own, but when you start combining the two strategies and do both of them halfway, it doesn’t work out well at all.

Our general philosophy is that we have no idea what’s going to happen with the markets—next month, next year, or for the next decade. So instead of trying to make educated guesses about what the market is going to do, we want to set up your plan in such a way that your financial goals are accomplished regardless of what the market does. If the market has a great year—terrific! We want to make sure that you’re participating in that growth. If the market has a bad year, we want to make sure that your retirement income doesn’t have to decrease just because the market happens to be having a rough time.

Our goal is to provide the most comprehensive approach to financial planning that we can. This includes:

Retirement income planning. Determining how much income you’ll need in retirement and the most efficient way for you to generate that income. This process also answers questions like “when should I start my Social Security?”

Tax planning. Looking ahead to future years and taking advantage of the tax code to help you be as tax efficient as possible, not just this year, but for the next decade or two.

Tax preparation. We offer tax prep services to our wealth management clients every spring. Clients who use this service find it helpful to have it under the same roof as their financial advisory relationship.

Medicare. For clients who have reached that magical age of 65, we can help you determine the best approach to Medicare and we’re licensed to sell Medicare supplement insurance from a variety of insurance companies.

Life insurance. We can help you with life insurance, both in terms of deciding if you current policies should be changed or cancelled, as well as acting as an agent for you in acquiring new coverage.

Long term care planning. Some people assume that having a long term care plan simply means having long term care insurance. That’s one possible approach, but it’s not necessarily the best approach for everyone. We can help you decide what’s right for you.

Legacy planning. We’re not attorneys and won’t be drafting wills or trusts for you. But we can guide you through the conversation to help you understand what you need on that front and then provide you with an attorney referral if you don’t have someone lined up already.