Financial Planning

In our Concord office, the wealth advisors and tax professionals at Monument Group work side by side with our estate planning attorneys at Woodman & Eaton, P.C., an affiliated law firm. Legal advice and documents come from Woodman & Eaton, P.C. or your own attorney, and Monument Group Wealth Advisors does not provide legal services.

Coordination does not guarantee a particular result. Tax rules, markets and personal circumstances change, and results vary by individual situation. Holistic planning also asks for more information from you at the start than a single-topic engagement does.

Most people we meet have already made sensible decisions. They have a retirement account, some insurance, a will drafted a number of years ago, and an accountant who files the return each spring. What they have not had is one advisor holding all of it in view at the same time.

That is where coordination earns its keep. A withdrawal strategy is worth more when it is set against your tax brackets. A beneficiary designation is worth checking against the will it is meant to support. An allocation chosen at forty-five deserves a fresh look at sixty. Each of those decisions was sound when it was made, and each becomes stronger when it is made in the company of the others.

A Master Plan is what holds them together. Every recommendation is tested against the rest of the plan before we bring it to you, which is the part people tell us they had not had before.

Families within ten years of retirement on either side, senior executives holding concentrated company stock, and people who have recently inherited and would like to handle it deliberately.

The common thread is a financial life with several parts that now depend on one another — more than one kind of account, income arriving from more than one place, documents drawn up under different circumstances — and a preference for one team that holds the whole picture rather than three professionals who each hold a third of it.

A plan written once and never revisited becomes a document rather than a strategy. Tax law changes, markets move, and priorities shift in ways that are difficult to forecast, so the plan has to be able to keep up with all three.

We review formally at least twice a year and more often when something real happens — a job change, a sale, a diagnosis, a death in the family. The plan is built to absorb those events rather than be invalidated by them.

Master Planning is the practice of making each financial decision in the presence of all the others. Its value compounds, because the decisions themselves compound: a withdrawal taken from the right account, a conversion completed in the year your tax bracket has room for it, a beneficiary designation confirmed against the current will. Individually each is a modest gain. Made deliberately and in sequence over a decade, they add up to a materially better result than the same decisions made one at a time.

The second benefit is confidence about spending. People who have a plan know what their resources will support, so they are able to spend in the years they are healthiest — the travel, the help with a first house, the family gathered in one place — with evidence behind the decision rather than hope. That is one of the outcomes we are most often thanked for.

The third benefit belongs to the people around you. A written plan gives a spouse, an adult child or an executor both the decisions and the reasoning behind them, at a point when they will have little appetite for reconstructing either. Putting it on paper is partly for you and substantially for them.