Summer is finally cooling off and various team members will be out of the office on a couple of much-deserved vacations (Florida, Caribbean, and Europe) over the next few months and attending conferences in September and October. Financial planning and investment conferences are almost as much fun as vacations as we "geek out" on the newest technologies and investment/economic insights. We continue to check emails while out of town and there is always at least one team member back at the office who will be there for you if something comes up. In addition, please use our online scheduling tool if you’d like to talk to Debbie or Courtney over the phone or in person, and as always we’re available by email.
Courtney won a scholarship to attend the NAPFA Financial Planning conference in Chicago in early October. There she'll attend sessions on the latest economic outlook (always exciting for an Econ major), providing financial planning services, and updates on investments, as well as meeting with software vendors and service providers to identify more tools for providing client services.
We had a busy summer transitioning to new project management and financial planning software with more robust features that will allow us to provide more timely and efficient services. Our previous management software included the Client Wealth Center where all of your documents were housed. We will be transferring client documents into our new systems, and giving you access to a separate program where we’ll be able to securely share documents back and forth. Be on the look out for an email from Courtney asking you to set up your login credentials to this new software as we move from ClientWealthCenter to the eMoney document vault.
Debbie has some new letters to put behind her name! She has obtained a new designation, Retirement Income Certified Professional® (RICP®) from the American College of Financial Services. The RICP® educational curricula is one of the most complete and comprehensive programs available to financial advisors with the goal of helping their clients create sustainable retirement income. Using the most current retirement portfolio management techniques, we will further enhance our skills in assisting clients to identify retirement income needs and objectives relative to the client’s lifestyle goals in retirement. The 3-course program covered the latest information on a broad range of retirement topics including the proper use of annuities (they are part of a larger toolbox for retirement funding), mitigation of risks to retirement income planning, estate issues, Social Security, health insurance and Medicare, housing decisions including aging in place and Continuing Care Retirement Communities, and income taxation. Armed with the latest academic theory on sustainable retirement income, the RICP enhances our retirement planning capabilities, allowing us to develop a sound portfolio withdrawal strategy with clients at different stages in their lives. We can help clients know how much they can safely take from their investments each year in retirement without risking running out of money over their anticipated life expectancy, while optimizing your tax situation. There are several different withdrawal strategies that we can explore based on preferences and needs and we will then work to implement a strategy for providing stable and reliable retirement income to you.
We’ve recently added a new investment fund to our portfolio: Dimensional Fund Advisers Investment Grade Portfolio Bond Fund (DFAPX). As market conditions change, we are gradually transitioning from CDs and money market funds back into intermediate bond funds because interest rates will likely be decreasing, and the bond funds will benefit from the actions of the Federal Reserve. We don't recommend selling your CDs, and instead reinvest the proceeds from maturing CDs into the bond funds. In recent weeks the market has been volatile, and this fund has already proven to be a good diversifier of stock market risk.