Planning with Execution
 (Content provided by The Advisors Forum;
reviewed and edited by James W. Garrett, Esq.)

Financial planning has become a generic term. You find it mentioned across media channels from banks to brokerages to accounting firms to personal finance. While the term itself may be diluted, planning is the first step in securing your long-term security. But this security is only realized when the plan is implemented.
 
Your various needs, anxieties, and aspirations fuel every step and define how you measure the plan's results. The actual method is best defined as "Planning with Execution" for the obvious truth that you won't get results unless the plan is put into action. As a single, flowing process, results present themselves as solutions to your needs and requirements. In other words, your income is more stable and certain; your spending matches your priorities; your taxes are less; you know what to do with your property; your loved ones are protected; your physical care is assured.  
 
Key Takeaways:

• Like anything worth achieving, a formal planning process is necessary to secure your long-term financial stability.
• An essential element of every plan is the inventory of your needs, anxieties, and aspirations.
• Your needs and requirements serve as the plan's objectives and determine the value of results.
• In order to achieve your desired results, an array of targeted investment, insurance, and trust solutions is instituted that generates net benefits to the costs incurred. 

Planners operate within a band of expertise such that they use the strategies they know and understand. This natural inclination to stay in one's comfort zone, though, may lead to limitations in which other tools beyond one's expertise may do a better job. Trusts are a clear example: Trusts' technical nature and imposing acronyms (e.g., CRUTs, GRATs, QPRTs, IDGTs, etc.) have built a barrier to understanding that constrains their broader use in producing more robust planning.
 
What you need to know: No one can be an expert in every one of the eight financial planning categories (see above table). Therefore, advisors operating in a team of experts leap over technical barriers and define comprehensive and efficient solutions. In this multidisciplinary approach, a trust attorney works alongside financial or other advisors and assists in using trusts' unique characteristics not only to generate true net savings (i.e., the dollar results > the dollar costs) but equally significant quality-of-life benefits.  
 
The Protective Cure
We buy many things that give us mental or emotional rewards whereby we proclaim that the costs were "worth it." Every day examples are vacations, education, and luxuries. Similarly, paying insurance premiums to protect against potential losses frees us mentally to enjoy driving a car, leaving our house empty while on vacation, and getting medical treatment for an injury or illness.
 
With this context, you should expect that solid planning shifts anxiety to comfort, turmoil to peace, and complexity to understanding. Trusts further deliver a protective cure against these possible hits to your mental and emotional quality of life:
 
*    the pain felt if loved ones aren't protected financially;
*    the worry that wealth will not last;
*    the possibility that a family will be left with hassle and discord after a loved one's death;
*    the risk that a family will dissolve into disharmony arguing about wealth;
*    the anxiety that a life's work could be lost to litigation;
*    the anguish if wealth isn't used according to one's values and beliefs;
*    the frustration that money could be wasted unnecessarily.
 
What you need to know: Although trusts offer various net financial benefits, removing anxieties and fears about your wealth may in and of itself enhance your quality of life. Considering these beneficial financial and mental or emotional results alongside a plan's set-up costs represents a balanced evaluation that leads to a more informed decision; you can proclaim, "It was worth it."
 
Actions to Consider:

• Build a complete needs/requirements inventory.
• In considering what is important to you for your future, list your fears and anxieties since if these are left untouched by your financial plan, joy may be sapped.
• Set up a table in which you identify in the left column the costs associated with planning and the plan's execution, and in the right column you enter the financial and mental/emotional value you expect.
• Judge the net results. If the net results are greater than the costs, you are richer than if you had done nothing.
• Set your standard as "Planning with Execution" and monitor the actual results to those that were expected.
• "Planning with Execution" is not a transaction but a process that makes ongoing adjustments as your needs/requirements inventory changes.

To comply with the U.S. Treasury regulations, we must inform you that (i) any U.S. federal tax advice contained in this newsletter was not intended or written to be used, and cannot be used, by any person for the purpose of avoiding U.S. federal tax penalties that may be imposed on such person and (ii) each taxpayer should seek advice from their tax adviser based on the taxpayer's particular circumstances.

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