Everyone Has a Personal Chief Financial Officer: How is Yours Doing?
March 01, 2006Wealthy individuals confront a growing volume of financial decisions and products. Whether it is from friends, co-workers or the thousands of advertisements we see daily, everyone has ideas about our money. Many of them just want to be helpful, but the vast majority are selling something. The trouble is we cannot afford to ignore them all, and decisions must be made if we want to grow and preserve our financial future. Enter the Personal Chief Financial Officer. (If you don’t know who this is in your life, the default is you.)
Financial Strategy Meets Life
A personal CFO understands what you want from life and plans your financial resources to achieve those things. Ask yourself: “Does my CFO have the expertise and experience to plan across the major financial disciplines to most effectively achieve my goals?” A secondary question may be: “Does he or she really spend the time and focus needed to provide a top-shelf result?” If you serve as your own CFO, ask yourself: “Is this the most valuable/desired use of my time?” In our increasingly complex life, a “no” response to any of these questions can yield devastating financial results. We see examples of this every day in lost opportunities, unsuitable investments, and naive retirement plans that will probably not make it.
Investment Discipline to Go the Distance
Your personal CFO needs to tailor a sophisticated investment strategy to meet your future needs, and should give you peace of mind about questions such as: Are my portfolios built for growth with capital preservation? Do I trust my CFO’s investment acumen enough to base my annual cash flow on it? Is he accountable for meeting my goals? Will she be proactive as new opportunities and obstacles appear? When you consider the impact that today’s investment decisions make on your financial future (read: cash flow), having the wrong CFO can be horribly expensive in ways you may never have considered.
Make Sure Things Get Done — Properly
Whole books are being written about the hectic, clutter-overloaded lives we are living. The last thing you need is one more follow-up item. But someone has to master the details if all of your hard work, earning, saving, and planning for the future is to make a difference. We have seen countless plans gone awry for lack of a proper signature or some other minor detail that made a major difference. Children disinherited, unnecessary but exorbitant income and estate taxes — almost anything is possible at the stroke of a pen — if the process is not shepherded properly. And when things really start to get complex and emotional (for instance, at the death of a loved one), having someone to call who knows what to do is priceless.
We have made the commitment to be the preeminent, fee-only, personal CFO for our clients. A team, in fact, of professionals who put together and manage a long term financial strategy centered on our Disciplined-Innovation™ Global Investment Solution. If you have questions about how your personal CFO is doing, we would be pleased to discuss our services in more detail. For the sake of your future, uncertainty in this part of your life should be addressed sooner rather than later. We believe there is a better way, a way which brings financial success and peace of mind while you experience the other, the more important, aspects of your life.
