With our brand-new website up and running, this is an ideal time to introduce, or reintroduce, our wealth practice to you. As a Wealth Advisor with many years of banking and financial services experience, I thought it might be helpful to tell you why I love being part of the KDP Wealth team and offer my perspective on why I would choose to work with KDP Wealth if I were a client or potential client. In this blog post, I will introduce three advantages as part of this (re)introduction, and will cover additional topics in the future.
Our Wealth Advisors Are All Serious Professionals:
Our team of Advisors have demonstrated a commitment to Financial Planning through advanced certifications. Each member of our team has earned either the ChFC® (Chartered Financial Consultant) or CFP® (Certified Financial Planner) designation, with some of our Advisors holding both. These designations follow similar educational pathways involving comprehensive financial planning while covering a multitude of subjects including retirement planning, retirement income planning, tax planning, business exit planning, gift and estate planning, and many other facets of financial planning. Both ChFC® and CFP® designations require ongoing continuing education and a commitment to a code of ethical behavior in the industry. In addition, the majority of our advisors hold additional designations as well.
Our advisors are FINRA Licensed and hold Life and Health Insurance Licenses in their residing states. Each of these licenses additionally require ongoing education and training.
Experience and Team Planning:
While industry certifications are an important statement of commitment to education and advancing industry knowledge, education alone cannot replace experience. Many institutions will hire a new Financial Advisor and then turn them loose. Financial Advisors are often paid by their own personal production, which leads to a heavy incentive on a sales culture. Clients regularly get lost or underserved due to the business model of the advisor’s practice with which they engage.
KDP Wealth utilizes a different approach. While each individual client is assigned to a primary Wealth Advisor, we employ a team approach to financial planning. No individual advisor can have experience in every facet of financial planning, no matter how many certifications or how much education they have, each advisor will have areas where support is needed. Our team is comprised of individuals who have years of prior experience in business management, personal and commercial banking, lending and other business and financial services.
Our team meets on a weekly basis to review each of our client situations. Together we identify client specific client needs that require attention and discuss various solutions. Often, we will bring another advisor into a follow-up meeting to provide the best expertise to each situation. By bringing these various experiences into play and supporting each other, our clients benefit from the varying knowledge available through the team approach that we take, rather than relying on the sole guidance of one advisor.
Holistic Planning:
The biggest reason I think KDP Wealth Management offers the best value to our clients is through the focus we emphasize on holistic financial planning. Practicing holistic financial planning allows us to look at your entire picture. We look at the current view, while looking ahead thinking about your future financial circumstances. Alternatively, some firms only want to focus on your liquid or current assets and by focusing on this narrow path, they may be ignoring potential future tax advantages that put real money back into your pocket or estate.
Our affiliation with Avantax, a firm built to provide tax intelligent planning, provides KDP Wealth the tools and resources to offer sophisticated tax and estate planning, as well as business succession, and gifting strategies. This means that we care about your non-investable assets and liabilities just as much as your investable assets. We care about things like your long-term health strategy and protecting your loved ones. We think about tomorrow. You may not plan to sell a property or business today, but with proper prior planning we could potentially help you save/avoid taxes on a sale of property, or through a business succession strategy.
This type of planning, while involving your CPA and attorney, along with supportive outside experts we bring to the table as appropriate, can potentially save you significant sums. If we were to only focus on your investable assets today, we could be costing you or your loved ones down the road.
Our desire is to be your trusted Wealth Advisor, who works alongside your CPA and attorney when applicable, to offer you a solid financial plan, not only for your life, but for your legacy as well. In future weeks I will be providing information on some of the strategies and types of solutions we offer.