Serving Cumming, Forsyth County GA and surrounding John's Creek, Alpharetta, Milton, Duluth, Buford, Suwanee, Flowery Branch, and Gainesville
What We Do & How We Can Help
- By Travis Echols
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- 14 Mar, 2019
A good financial adviser is one of the most important relationships in your life. The adviser serves as a single point of contact for your financial needs.
The various pieces of your finances are connected. If you change one piece, it usually affects other pieces. For example, what might seem to be a good decision from an estate planning or tax standpoint could be a terrible decision from an investment or retirement income perspective, and vice versa. A good adviser can help you coordinate decisions made with the help of other financial professionals as needed.
Like a jigsaw puzzle, the right placement of the individual pieces can create a picture that is much greater than the sum of the parts. A good adviser will start with the box-top of the puzzle to help you clarify what you desire for your future. Then all the individual pieces can be coordinated and directed toward that end.
Finances are complex, with many curves and pitfalls along the path. The key is finding an adviser who is a good fit for your needs. Let me describe our firm so you can decide if we may be the right adviser to help you.Who We Are
Echols Financial Services is a financial planning firm specializing in retirement planning, tax planning, and investments for people over age 50. All we do is financial planning for retirees and people close to retirement. I started the firm in 2004. My story is here.
We enjoy helping people make important and often difficult decisions such as:
- Do I have enough money to retire and remain comfortably retired for life?
- When is the best time for me to retire?
- When should I claim my Social Security benefits?
- Which Social Security claiming strategy is best for me?
- When should I enroll in Medicare and which plan type is best for me?
- How can I maximize my pension?
- How do I invest, now that I am in retirement?
- How should I withdraw money from my investments in retirement?
- How can I minimize my lifetime tax liability?
Retirement planning can be
intimidating and complicated. Our approach is to make the intimidating painless
and the complicated simple.
Who We Serve
We specialize in helping people who are retired or very close to it (typically 5 years or less). This allows us to tailor our service and expertise to the unique needs of retirees.
While our clients would hardly
consider themselves to be “rich”, thanks to a lifetime of diligent saving and
frugal living they have accumulated a retirement nest egg of at least $500,000.
Our clients understand that the success of their retirement is too important to be doing it themselves, and they understand the value of having expert guidance.
How We Work
We are a fiduciary, fee-only firm which means we don’t sell products. Imagine going to your doctor with a concern about your heart, and before running any tests, the doctor tried to sell you a pacemaker. The doctor then explained that you needed to act today before prices went up. Later you learned that the doctor was paid extra to promote this particular brand of pacemaker. While absurd for the medical profession, this scenario closely resembles much of the investment world.
As a firm, we take very seriously our fiduciary duty to always act in the client’s best interest (vs. just trying to sell you a product). In addition to a legal obligation, for more than 15 years our firm has been built on a foundation of placing the client’s interest before any thoughts of our own compensation. We recommend for clients the same investment strategies used in our personal accounts and the accounts of our immediate family members. Our commitment to honest and ethical behavior has allowed us to build a successful firm.
Click here to see a 3-minute video clip that compares Fiduciaries and Stock Brokers to Dietitians and Butchers.
Our Process
Finding the right
adviser is no doubt one of the most important financial decisions a person can
make.The first test of
an adviser is whether they help you make an educated and informed decision
about hiring them.
The
only reason to ever hire an adviser is if you can be confident that the value
you will receive is worth more than the fee you will pay.
Since we specialize in helping people in or nearing retirement, I will walk you through our no-cost, no obligation process for showing you exactly how we can help make your retirement a success.
Learning our process will also give you a framework by which to evaluate other
firms you may be considering.
For people who are potentially a good fit for our firm, there is no cost or obligation for this process as we want you to know exactly how we can help you before you pay us a single penny in fees or trust us with a dollar of your nest egg.
· Step 1 -
Initial Phone Meeting
Before committing your time or ours, this 15-minute phone call will give us
both a chance to make sure your situation matches our expertise. After all, you
wouldn’t see a knee surgeon if you needed shoulder surgery.
If we aren’t a good fit for each other we may be able to introduce you to a firm who is better suited to your needs. Schedule a 15-minute phone call anytime, 24 hour per day.
· Step2 -
First Meeting
Prescription without evaluation and
diagnosis is malpractice
The goal of this meeting is to get perfectly clear on your goals, concerns, and unique financial situation.
Your answers to our questions, along with the documents we requested you bring, will guide our analysis, which will result in plain-English answers to four critical questions.
· Step 3 - Our
Analysis
This is where the magic happens
We will apply over 20 years of experience and hundreds of hours of training and mentoring by the industry’s top experts to help you answer the following questions:
- Can I afford to retire?
- Am I overpaying in taxes?
- Can my portfolio be improved?
- Can I eliminate, or at least reduce, threats to my retirement?
· Step 4 -
Second Meeting
This is where the proverbial rubber hits the road
During this meeting I will explain, in plain English, exactly what you need to do to achieve your financial goals, including the answers to the four questions we asked during our analysis.
This is where you will see, in dollars and cents, how our firm can improve your finances.
At the end of this meeting we will ask you to think about if and how you would like to begin working with our firm and to sleep on it.
· Step 5 -
Sleep On It
Having been in business for more
than 20 years, we are in no rush for you to make a decision. Prior to deciding
whether we should work together, you will want to answer the following
questions:
- Do I like/trust/respect the adviser at Echols Financial Services?
- Will the benefits I receive exceed the cost?
- Do I understand and agree with their retirement planning and investment philosophy?
- Do their recommendations make sense to me?
· Step 6 – Paperwork
After sleeping on it, we will follow up to answer any additional questions you may have. If you decide to work with our firm, we will complete the paperwork and start helping you achieve your immediate and long-term financial goals.
This carefully designed process helps you make an educated and informed decision about our firm without any cost, obligation, or pressure.
How to Get Started
If this sounds like a process that could help you, and you have saved at least $500,000 towards your retirement, we would love to speak with you. Let’s get in touch.
(While we would love to help everyone, we
have very intentionally limited the number of clients we serve so that
each client gets the personalized attention they need. With that said, I
am always glad to talk to anyone who has questions about money, and
point them in the right direction if I can.)
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Investment Advisory Services offered through JT Stratford, LLC. JT Stratford, LLC and Echols Financial Services, LLC are separate entities.
- Liquidity--Retirement assets are not being locked up or annuitized such that capital is not available for emergencies.
- Income—Using an optimized withdrawal rate, an increasing income is produced to combat inflation (unlike many pensions, bank and insurance strategies that are not inflation-adjusted).
- Growth--assets that can combat inflation over a 20 to 30-year period, giving the retiree more income and upside potential under normal and good economic times.
- Safety--manages the myriad of investment risks like market risk, inflation risk, and credit risk. Under worst-case scenarios, if withdrawal amounts are adjusted by using guardrails, the portfolio can still provide a lifetime income.
Here is an executive summary of how to build up a portfolio for retirement in seven steps.
1. Values clarification and goal-setting . Figure out the income objective and capability of your retirement assets in lifestyle terms, then financial terms. In other words, set realistic, specific, financial goals based on your core life values.
2. Asset allocation glide path . Figure out how to diversify your retirement assets among stocks, bonds, and cash, based on your age, risk tolerance, retirement goals, and changing market values.
3. Valuation-dependent efficient frontier . Figure out which areas of the markets are historically inexpensive, and which are historically expensive. Don’t take on more volatility than you need to for the growth you need or desire.
4. Multi-asset class approach . Diversify one more step for more growth and less volatility. Put more money in the specific market areas that are less expensive and less money in the specific market areas that are more expensive.
5. Tax-aware asset location and distribution . Save as much on taxes as possible by figuring out which type of investments should be held in which types of accounts. If you are drawing an income from your assets, figure out the least-costly order for making withdrawals.
6. Investment selection based on account type (qualified, nonqualified) and asset-class propensity and magnitude of outperformance (passive, factor, managed, etc. ). Figure out what kind of investment to use (index mutual fund, factor mutual fund, actively managed mutual fund, single factor ETF, multifactor ETF, passive ETF, individual stocks, individual bonds, Unit Investment Trust, closed-end fund, etc.) based on the account type, asset class, and growth and income needs.
7. Rules-guided rebalancing based on retirement glide path and multi-asset-class approach . Readjust the investment mix based on your changing personal situation and changing market values.
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Here is a summary of the details backing this approach. Also, click here for more background information regarding my investment philosophy.
1. Values clarification and goal-setting
Investment planning for (or in) retirement starts with retirement planning. You start with thinking about your life goals...your dreams...your ideal life in retirement. It could involve doing no work, working part-time, or doing seasonal work. Your ideal life could be going back to school, spending more time with family, traveling, ministry, etc.
Ask yourself questions like, "What would I want to do if I
didn't need to work for money?" or "What are the most important
dangers, opportunities, and strengths I need to address?" or“Ten years from now, if I am looking back on a successful
ten years, what will I have achieved?”
This conversation allows you to create specific
goals around your most cherished values. And your goals will be unique to you.
You then design an investment plan to help you live your ideal life.
This kind of goal-focused, plan-driven approach minimizes the
chances of making bad investment choices based on current events and emotions.
Instead, you can choose and maintain the
specific mix of investments that can best deliver the results you need--using a
disciplined, research-driven approach.
2. Asset allocation glide path
The next major question is what kind of investments do you need to meet your goals. All investments have risk. Even "safe" investments over long periods have inflation risk. No single investment delivers growth, high income, and safety of principal. The key is designing a portfolio that balances them in a way that supports your retirement objectives.
And this mix may change over time. For example, for most people, it makes sense to gradually decrease their exposure to high-growth, high-volatility assets like stocks (i.e., equities) as they approach retirement. In retirement, it is usually best to maintain a flat equity glide path, dynamically adjusted for valuation. This approach protects you from the retirement-danger-zone risks of portfolio size effect and sequence risk, while allowing you to take advantage of bear markets and market corrections. See How to Navigate the Retirement Danger Zone .
Protecting your lifetime retirement savings from excessive taxes is a crucial part of holistic financial planning. This involves protecting your IRA, 401k, lump sum pension rollover, Social Security, and any other type of retirement account or income stream from crushing tax rates.
So let's be sure to differentiate tax preparation
from tax planning
.
Tax preparation , also called tax return preparation, looks backward, one year at a time, to get the numbers right to accurately calculate your tax liability (and how much you owe or overpaid).
Tax planning on the other hand looks at taxes in the context of your overall financial picture. A tax planner not only looks in the rear-view mirror but will look forward 20 to 30 years at your projected tax liability and ask what can be done to lower your lifetime tax bill.
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If you have savings outside of pretax retirement accounts invested in capital assets (like stocks, bonds, ETFs, mutual funds, precious metals, jewelry, and real estate) which have large unrealized capital gains, this article is for you. You may be missing the opportunity to pay zero taxes NOW instead of 15% or higher rates in the future. Sign up to receive my free monthly email articles on retirement planning--no cost, no obligation
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Originally written on Aug 2, 2018 and updated for tax law changes.
If you are no longer working and have reached the age of 72,
you probably know about Uncle Sam’s rule for you to take a Required Minimum Distribution
(RMD) from your traditional and rollover IRA(s) each year for the rest of your life. You can always withdraw more,
but this requirement is the minimum
you must take or be severely penalized. Fortunately,
this rule does not apply to Roth IRAs. (The SECURE Act of 2019 changed the starting RMD age from 70½ to 72 starting in 2020, but fortunately you can still make a Qualified Charitable Distribution (QCD) starting the year you turn 70½.)
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If you have delayed paying taxes in your pretax IRA, 401(k), or 403(b), etc, there comes a time when the IRS wants their taxes. And if you don’t give them their taxes based on their required withdrawal schedule, you'll get hit with a 50% penalty on top of what you owed.
Along with Social Security and other retirement income, this RMD can significantly raise your tax rate. Also read How to Dodge the Social Security Tax Torpedo . There are not many ways to reduce this tax burden. In the past, retirees have used various deductions including charitable cash contributions and gifting of highly appreciated assets to charities. (The latter not only gives you, the donor, a deduction but also avoids a long-term capital gains tax bill.)
However, with the passing of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA) , with its almost doubling of the standard deduction, itemizing deductions won’t make sense for near as many retirees. Ah, but there is still a strategy. But first let’s better understand the RMD.
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The latest book I am reading is “ The Psychology of Money ” by Morgan Housel. Chapter 3 is entitled “Never Enough”. In this chapter, Housel talks about when rich people do crazy things. He tells stories of wealthy people who never had a sense of enough and wrecked their reputations, families, freedom, and happiness because of it. I have also talked to older couples who tell me they once had a much better retirement in view, but the quest for more led them to make unwise investment decisions that left them financially crippled in retirement. The importance of knowing when you have enough is not only vital to when you retire but also how you retire. It can affect how you invest, how you withdraw, and your overall satisfaction before and during retirement. Be sure to read to the end where I summarize a few key takeaways. Housel makes the four following observations in chapter 3 of his book. Sign up to receive my free monthly email articles on retirement planning--no cost, no obligation
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Whether you do mini-Roth conversions over several years or big Roth conversions in a few strategic years, the Roth conversion strategy could save you tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars over your retirement. This article will get deep into the issues of Roth conversions for retirees and the ten steps to take to be sure it is done properly. Be sure to scan or read to the end where I will give you the simple answer to getting your Roth conversion questions answered. Sign up to receive my free monthly email articles on retirement planning--no cost, no obligation
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Making big financial decisions immediately following the death of a close family member can be dangerous. It is often best to allow some time before tackling big financial decisions. On the other hand, some people find getting immersed in the finances is helpful in coping with the loss. Whatever way is best for you, you will need to give it your
careful attention to avoid big financial mistakes. The different types of accounts have different rules. I'll address the most common types. In the case of the death of a parent or anyone other than your spouse in which you are a non-spouse beneficiary, there are many rules that you must know to make the best decision for you and your family. (In this article, I use the common parent-child inheritance, but the planning strategies can apply to other non-spouse situations.) Your decisions can have major tax and investment consequences, both now and in the future. And some of these decisions have time deadlines keyed to your parent’s date of death. Also, some of these decisions are irreversible. You can download my free Estate Planning Survivor Checklist here
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So, you don’t want to rush in and make decisions without knowing the rules, and you don’t want to wait too long and be stuck with fewer options. (In this article, I am not addressing estate taxes. As of 2021, only estates valued at $11.70 million or more are subject to federal estate tax. But there are plenty of other tax pitfalls to navigate around. I am also going to focus on liquid savings like investment and retirement accounts, versus real estate which will be for another time.) Sign up to receive my free monthly email articles on retirement planning--no cost, no obligation
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Delaying Social Security makes a lot of sense for many retirees; but there are common pitfalls that can cost you a bundle. As you know, the longer you delay your Social Security Retirement benefit, the higher your lifetime monthly payments are figured to be. This increase in delaying continues until age 70, after which there are no further increases for delaying. This increase for each month that you delay filing is not small, especially considering the current low interest rates. Even after full Social Security age, your payment goes up by 8% per year until age 70. Sign up to receive my free monthly email articles on retirement planning--no cost, no obligation . Here are the five big mistakes of delaying your Social Security retirement benefit. |
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Are you wondering about the impact of the
2020 election results on your retirement? If so, you are not alone. The two political parties are greatly polarized. While the Democrat party has moved further toward ethno-centric socialism, the Republican party has moved further toward nationalistic populism. The difference in the two parties’ goals for our country is wider than ever. Sign up to receive my free monthly email articles on retirement planning--no cost, no obligation . |
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Peachtree Parkway Center
Cumming, GA 30041
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Investment Advisory Services offered through JT Stratford, LLC. JT Stratford, LLC and Echols Financial Services, LLC are separate entities.
Serving Cumming, GA, Forsyth County, and the surrounding areas of John's Creek, Alpharetta, Milton, Duluth, Buford, Suwanee, Flowery Branch, and Gainesville
