Comprehensive Planning

Simply put, the word “comprehensive” means all-encompassing… covering all the bases.  Traditionally, a comprehensive financial plan would cover preparation of personal financial statements, analyzing cash flow, tax planning, estate planning, personal risk management and insurance, retirement planning, investment planning and management, and optimizing available employer and government benefit plans.  In reality, not everyone has issues in all of these areas and some issues have higher priorities than others.  In practice, a financial plan can be considered “comprehensive” if it covers all areas of your financial life that impact the achievement of your life and financial goals, even if it ignores or treats lightly areas that are not likely to impact your goals.

 

One problem that often arises is that people don’t always know which issues or areas are important to their financial well-being.  They may be motivated to pursue financial planning by a single pressing issue and that issue can sometimes seem so important to them that it clouds their vision about other issues that may be as, or more, important.

 

At Heling Associates, we recognize the primacy of the issues that bring you to financial planning.  But over the years, we have developed a way of ensuring that other important issues don’t get lost along the way.  We do this by conducting a “Financial Needs Review” (FNR) at the onset of every new planning relationship.  The FNR is like a mini comprehensive plan that examines each area of potential exposure but only deeply enough to determine if the area poses an issue to your financial security and the achievement of your goals and, if so, it’s relative importance in the grand scheme of things.  That we can design a planning process for you that as comprehensive as it needs to be without devoting excess effort to areas that are not likely to improve your situation.  Once we have completed the FNR, we proceed with more in-depth planning in order of the relative priority of the various issues and planning areas.