Wealth advisors can help you monitor and analyze your portfolio’s performance and suggest changes to your financial plan when necessary. These professionals can help you with everything from equity selection to finding alternate investments to help ensure you meet your financial goals.
High-net-worth individuals looking to diversify their wealth can benefit significantly from working with wealth advisors. They have a strong background in accounting, finance, and investments and are experienced in helping clients determine how to preserve and manage their money and assets. A wealth advisor offers valuable advice and various other services to manage your finances.
Services Offered by Wealth Advisors
While portfolio diversification helps reduce risk and improve long-term portfolio performance, diverse portfolios may be difficult to manage. Wealth advisors specialize in procuring and analyzing financial data, identifying goals, developing tailored strategies, making intelligent decisions, and solving problems. They can help you figure out suitable strategies to balance risks and rewards. Here are some of the services they provide.
Investment Planning
A wealth advisor will work with you and create an investment strategy based on your goals and risk tolerance. This involves finding ways to potentially maximize returns from your investments, maintaining an appropriate mix of stocks, bonds, and other investments in your portfolio, rebalancing your portfolio as needed, and monitoring the performance of your investments on an ongoing basis.
Wealth advisors also help with long-term financial planning by taking a holistic approach. A carefully- designed long-term financial plan could help minimize the implications of unforeseen emergencies, like the recent pandemic or recessions, which could affect economies worldwide.
Strategic Tax Planning
Wealth managers analyze finances from the tax perspective to help ensure you pay the lowest taxes. They are fully adept with tax saving laws and regulations and can efficiently plan your investments, purchases, and expenditures, making your finances tax efficient.
One strategy used by wealth advisors to minimize taxes is tax-loss harvesting. Tax-loss harvesting is the timely selling of assets at a loss to offset capital gain tax. It usually helps offset short-term gains, which are taxed higher than long-term capital gains. Additionally, saving on taxes via a retirement plan is one of the most popular tax-saving strategies.
There are many retirement plans which offer tax advantages. For example - - Individual Retirement Account (IRA) is a retirement plan that offers tax-deferred or tax-free benefits. Tax-deferred means you pay taxes only when you withdraw the money, and tax-free means you don’t have to pay taxes if some conditions are met at the time of withdrawal. There are other retirement plans, too, like 401(k), mainly used by larger companies, allowing employees to contribute part of their incomes to an individual account and offering tax benefits.
Wealth advisors can help you create an estate plan that fits your unique situation and circumstances. An effective estate plan should consider several factors regarding your wishes concerning the distribution of assets, including the beneficiaries to retirement accounts. The core document often associated with estate planning is the will. Sometimes, wealth managers may also work in collaboration with lawyers, bankers, brokers, and other professionals to provide estate planning services to clients.
Wealth advisors also help with legacy planning, which focuses on what happens to your tangible assets when you are gone. This will help ensure a more holistic approach to estate planning.
Risk Management
Wealth advisors create strategies aimed at growing your income and multiplying your accumulated capital. They analyze the risk connected with the investments and try to minimize the loss. Generally, they also create a risk profile that is unique to you, which provides insight into your ability and willingness to take risks. This helps advisors choose suitable investments from the available pool.
Customer protection is becoming increasingly important as regulatory scrutiny increases. According to FINRA 2111 suitability rule, the financial advisor must have a reasonable basis for the recommendation provided and prove that the investment strategy is suitable for the customer. This data-driven approach also ensures the advisors’ ability to monitor risks.
Insurance Planning
Insurance planning involves carefully selecting insurance policies to protect you and your loved ones financially against unexpected losses or accidents. Insurance planning is a part of risk management where wealth advisors will familiarize you with available coverage for your health insurance, liability insurance, medicare, long-term care insurance, etc. They develop a better-suited combination of policies to create a 360-degree financial shield of protection around yourself and your family.
Before developing an insurance plan, factors such as emergency expenses, the number of dependents, and the financial portfolio will be considered.
Philanthropic Planning
The rules, regulations, and tax codes for charitable giving are anything but simple. A wealth manager can help you and the non-profit organization benefit from charitable giving by utilizing strategies such as DAFs, bunching, itemizing deductions, etc. Wealth managers can also be valuable in directing you to the organization that aligns with your interests.
Alternative Investment Planning
Alternative investment options, like hedge funds, venture capital, art, and antiques, usually have fewer regulations and are illiquid. Wealth advisors may suggest alternative investments for diversifying a portfolio. They could serve as an inflation hedge and provide potential income. According to a survey, an average of 14.5% of alternative investment allocations were reported in the first half of 2022.
Wealth advisors take a comprehensive approach to financial planning by coordinating with multiple financial parties and conducting deep market research, making your financial decisions less cumbersome. It's vital to understand the investment plans and their risks before investing.
If you need the help of wealth advisors to make informed financial decisions, contact Fulcrum Wealth Advisors. We create custom solutions based on each client‘s portfolio requirements. Schedule a complimentary strategy session today to understand how our transparent investment guidance works.
All investing involves risk, including the possible loss of principal. There is no assurance that any investment strategy will be successful.
A diversified portfolio does not assure a profit or protect against loss in a declining market.
Asset allocation is an investment strategy that will not guarantee a profit or protect you from loss.
Always consult your legal advisor for a comprehensive review of your situation. Neither Cetera Advisor Networks LLC nor any of its representatives give legal advice.
Alternative investments often engage in leverage and other investment practices that are extremely speculative and involve a high degree of risk. Such practices may increase the volatility of performance and the risk of investment loss, including the loss of the entire amount that is invested. There may be conflicts of interest relating to the Alternative Investment and its service providers. Similarly, interests in an Alternative Investment are highly illiquid and generally are not transferable without the consent of the sponsor, and applicable securities and tax laws will limit transfers.