Financial planning is about relationships because a financial plan is not a one-time event. It’s an ongoing process.
Most financial planners broadly help “individuals and families.” By contrast, my process at BYH is specifically and intentionally geared toward a particular type of client. I specialize in helping professionals earning six figures who are in their 30s and 40s with actionable strategies to help achieve the goal of living well today while still planning responsibly for tomorrow.
That means all of my systems, strategies, tools, and processes are designed with someone exactly like you — and your needs, your values, and your preferences — in mind. The entire setup of BYH was created and built to support a specific type of planning.
FINANCIAL PLANNING AND ADVICE THAT CATERS TO YOU
I’m confident that my process is the one for your situation, because I’ve worked with thousands of professionals who are dealing with the same opportunities and challenges. Here are some common scenarios we might run into:
PLANNING AHEAD
- Setting up a system for spending and saving that allows you to enjoy the travel (or other activities) you want to do now, without jeopardizing your future financial security
- Understanding the true cost of homeownership and where that might fit into your financial life — and if there are better options than buying right now
- Planning for the actual financial impact of growing your family, including managing cash flow around children, saving for college, and more
Investing Strategically
- Ensuring you fully understand what an HSA is and how you can leverage it to grow your wealth
- Taking advantage of a Roth IRA — even if you think you make too much money to contribute to one
- Properly managing risk, asset allocation, and portfolio diversity in the context of your needs and what you hope to accomplish
- Providing the education you need to feel confident about and comfortable with your investment strategy
Considering Complexity
- Determining the priority order of your goals (after helping you understand what’s most important) and creating clarity around the best next steps to take with your money
- Evaluating the tax ramifications of non-qualified retirement and executive compensation plans to determine the best course of action that could significantly reduce your tax bill
- Having an objective conversation around your actual insurance needs (BYH does not sell insurance and is fee-only, meaning we never receive commissions or kickbacks)
Does Your Advisor Relate to What’s Important to You?
Beyond Your Hammock is unique among fee-only financial planners in Boston because I am the kind of person I work with.
I’m 38 years old — and the average age of my clients is 38. And just like my clients, I’m a highly driven and motivated professional who wants to create time to enjoy what’s most important in my life. Being on the same level as the types of clients I work with gives me a level of empathy and understanding that older advisors from a different generation may not have.
Have you ever talked with a financial advisor and felt they judged you for what you said was important to you? Or did they try to convince you that you needed different goals? Or you shared something with an advisor who then acted like they they completely understood what you said — but from their response, you knew they had NO CLUE what you were talking about?
I’ve been there myself and experienced these conversations. (In fact, it was older advisors who told me my business would fail right out of the gate. It’s been 5 years now, and Beyond Your Hammock is running stronger than ever.)
The way I personally work and interact with clients is vastly different than the majority of other financial planners because of the perspective I have through working with my peers. I’m always happy to share what I do with my own finances and provide insight into my personal financial decisions.
My goal is to help you make your financial decisions with greater confidence and satisfaction — which means I’m not here to tell you what you should do (or to say since you’re in your 30s or 40s, all you need to do is save for retirement and worry about the rest later).
When we work together, I’ll show you:
- All the angles to consider for your situation
- Each path that’s available for you to take
- The pros and cons of all your options, and how each decision you might make could impact your wealth and overall financial life
- How to think about your choices in a way that helps you make a decision that’s right for you
There are plenty of quality CFPs out there who do fee-only work, but very few who focus on solely helping clients like you and therefore very few who deeply understand the opportunities, challenges, needs, and goals you have. That’s where I see the most value in my service, because I do have that understanding thanks to my age and specialization.
Get tangible benefits from the Financially Sound program:
- 2-3 financial planning launch meetings to help you get organized, prioritize what’s important to you, identify immediate action items and key areas of focus, decide on an appropriate investment strategy, and set the agenda for our planning for the rest of the first year together
- Summaries that capture our conversations from these initial meetings, with a bullet point action list so you know exactly what to do and when to do it to make progress and grow wealth
- 3 annual meetings to maintain and adjust your plan as life continues to evolve, and to help hold you accountable to staying on track
- Access to me between meetings as important and/or urgent questions arise
- Monthly emails highlighting new ideas and changes that you need to be aware of
- Powerful tools that can carefully analyze the complexities in your financial situation to help you make better decisions
- Financial planning software that can run scenarios and visual, graphic projections to help you decide which actions to take now and how they will impact your future
- A specialized online portal that aggregates your accounts in real time, providing ongoing updates to your cash flow and balance sheet
Learn More about the Financially Sound Program
You’re Busy.
You’re busy, your life is hectic, and there is a lot going on week to week and month to month. That’s exactly why periodic meetings with your financial planner throughout the year make a difference. There’s no way to capture everything that happened in your life in the last 12 months to present it to an advisor at your annual meeting — let alone have the advisor truly understand your thoughts about it.
Financial planning should be proactive, but a single annual meeting leaves you no choice but to constantly react to what already happened over the last year.
Think about your business or career goals. How do you think you’d perform if you set your benchmarks for the year on January 1, but didn’t revisit them, or your progress toward them, until December 31?
The BYH process is designed to engage you and put you in action. This isn’t about writing down lots of complicated plans and ideas on paper, handing it to you, and saying “see you next year.” Together, we’ll identify what’s important to you. Then, BYH creates your action plan and provides the tools you need to successfully make progress toward the life you want.
Financial Planning Allows You to Invest in Yourself
Financial planning is an opportunity to invest in your life, and gives you a process for using your money wisely to get what you actually want now and in the future. Just like a personal trainer designs the proper program for your specific fitness needs and holds you accountable to staying focused on your goals, I do the same with your money because I want to empower you to make smarter, more informed decisions now that can produce dramatic results in the future.
Some of that value is more intangible than the list of deliverables above. The smart financial decisions you make today (and the not-so-smart decisions you avoid) create a compound effect over the long-term: the more you do correctly today, the greater your level of success is likely to be in the future. The small adjustments I can show you how to make today, and my advice to help you optimize your financial life, can add hundreds of thousands of dollars to your net worth over your lifetime.
Let’s work together
If you want to make the best decisions with your money, consider working with a fee-only financial planner who serves as your fiduciary 100% of the time — and not only understands, but also respects, what’s important to you.
Beyond Your Hammock
A fee-only financial planning firm based in Boston that serves as a fiduciary to deliver objective financial advice to motivated professionals in their 30s and 40s
Eric Roberge, CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™
Team@BeyondYourHammock.com
Click here to schedule a free, 30-minute introductory call to determine if moving forward together is the right choice for you.
Or, feel free to use the contact form to get in touch.