The typical financial advisor loves to focus on your investments—after all, most earn sales commissions for selling you stocks, bonds, annuities, or mutual funds.
But the team at Align Wealth Management seeks to take care of every facet of our clients’ financial lives, from cash flow to taxes, from insurance to estate planning and charitable giving. Simply put, we believe in treating you as a human being – not as an investment account. And we’re armed with the best tools and technology to make it happen.
Our cornerstone technology for comprehensive planning is a software suite called MoneyGuidePro. MoneyGuidePro helps us gather and consolidate your whole financial life in one place. With it, we—and you—can clearly see your current financial situation 24/7.
MoneyGuidePro clearly illustrates everything from your cash flow to your assets and liabilities. It tracks not just the accounts we manage, but also assets such as bank accounts and loans, all of which can be updated quickly. As a goals based tool, it also records your specific objectives, such as funding college, paying for weddings, buying a home or securing your retirement.
Our clients have direct access to this dynamic tool to ensure that are always on track through the financial planning portal on our website. That’s a big departure from past industry practices, when clients had to call their advisor every time they needed a piece of information. The financial plans themselves used to be paper-based, and often the size of a small phone directory! Now they are electronic and updated in real time. A living breathing plan. Real wealth management.
MoneyGuidePro is full of nifty features. Among them: the “Play Zone,” where you can use sliders to explore the probability of achieving your goals under different scenarios. You’ll see how entering different hypotheticals—saving more, earning different investment returns, retiring earlier or later—affects your statistical probability of success.
You can also learn the impact of higher or lower inflation, different life expectancies, or health-care expenses. In addition, MoneyGuidePro lets us simplify complex calculations to learn, for example, how and when you should claim Social Security in order to maximize your benefits. The more you know about possible future scenarios, the more you can prepare with confidence.
Our investment in technology like MoneyGuidePro reflects our commitment to not only empowering our clients, but also helping them master the many different areas of their financial life. So whether you need guidance on investing, or when to retire, or whether you can afford that big trip or purchase, you can rely on us. We have no financial incentive to focus only on a narrow part of your financial life. Knowing that we can help our clients succeed throughout their entire financial lives is why we love coming to work every day. We are Client Focused. Period.
Brian Puckett's Blog 