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Financial Planning Services

Our comprehensive financial planning services are designed to help you achieve your long-term goals with clarity and confidence. Listening to you is the first step. Once we understand the priorities in your life, our conversations, strategies, and recommendations can be aligned with you and your goals in mind.

The Planner's Edge Team

Our personalized approach assesses your unique financial situation and provides strategies in areas like retirement planning, tax optimization, cash flow management, estate planning, and more. By creating a clear roadmap that aligns with your life objectives, we simplify complex decisions.

Our roadmap is called the Serious Money Vision Map. It is a personalized, graphical representation of your current and future financial life, containing all the moving pieces of your financial story. We build it together during interactive sessions and generate powerful visual charts.

We challenge your Vision Map with “what if” scenarios: What if you downsize? What if you invest differently? What if you retire earlier? All outcomes display visually in real time. Based on the insights from your Vision Map, we now have a plan and a path to follow together.

Tenets of Our Serious Money Planning Services

Confident Woman

More isn’t a goal….
enough is a goal.

Goals must be measurable as an event or a quantifiable metric. A goal of "more" is a moving target that can never be reached. A goal of "enough" can be reached: e.g., enough cash flow to match spending needs; enough extra to buy a new car; enough extra at the end of retirement to leave an inheritance to loved ones. A trusted financial advisor will help you establish realistic and achievable goals.

Risk and Safety may not be what you think

Conventional wisdom suggests that stocks are risky but bonds and cash are safe. This is true, looking only at price fluctuations. But, looking at purchasing power, which refers to how much stuff you can buy with a dollar, risk and safety reverse.

With rising inflation, bonds and cash are designed at best to maintain (but usually lose) your purchasing power. Equities (e.g., stocks) are designed, over the long term, to increase your purchasing power.

Unconventional wisdom therefore maintains that which increases purchasing power is safe (stocks) and that which reduces purchasing power is risky (bonds and cash). A trusted advisor can help you understand this perspective.
Couple in nature looking content
Older couple with grandchild looking happy

It’s a long journey so stay on the train

Thinking of your investment life as a train ride from Los Angeles to New York, your investments will climb mountains to high points and descend valleys to low points. You will spend most of ride cruising down tracks where your investing life seems easy and peaceful and surprisingly positive. But you will also encounter obstacles (primarily from the media) that will frighten you and cause you to consider exiting the train at the next stop. It is almost certain that if you exit the train midway your ultimate destination will fall short of New York. It is very likely that you will need a train conductor (i.e., your trusted financial advisor) to help keep you on the train.

There is a better way to measure your progress

If you are feeling frustrated by your progress (in almost any situation) it is likely due to measuring where you are against a future ideal in your head of where you want to be. This gap between where you are and your ideal can be huge and overwhelming. Instead, turn around and measure where you are against where you started. Often your progress-to-date will erase your frustration about how far you have to go. Your trusted advisor will help you properly measure your progress to promote confidence in your progress.
woman having a coffee looking out a window
Family taking walk in nature

Feeling confident about your financial future is a two-step process

Step 1: We build models that will give you clear and powerful pictures of your financial future. We will persist until we feel confident about the plan for your financial future.

Step 2: Transfer our confidence to you so that you go forward in your life with a clear path and simple strategies for staying on the path. This is what your trusted advisor is trained to provide for you.

Life is Uncertain, Eat Dessert First

Among the many benefits of a plan that gives you a clear and powerful picture of your financial future is the confidence that allows you to financially enjoy the present. Whether upgrading your home, taking an amazing vacation, buying season tickets to your favorite team, or crossing off another bucket list item, having a long-term plan in place gives you permission to just say yes, instead of “not now.” We all know that you can't take it with you and life is uncertain, so with your plan in place, we say eat dessert first!
Man and son enjoying an ice cream; Eat Dessert First - The Planner's Edge

Redirection Notice

You are now leaving The Planner’s Edge, LLC website and will be entering the Charles Schwab & Co., Inc. (“Schwab”) website.

Schwab is a registered broker-dealer, and is not affiliated with The Planner’s Edge, LLC or any advisor(s) whose name(s) appears on this website. The Planner’s Edge, LLC is independently owned and operated. Schwab neither endorses nor recommends The Planner’s Edge, LLC. Regardless of any referral or recommendation, Schwab does not endorse or recommend the investment strategy of any advisor. Schwab has agreements with The Planner’s Edge, LLC under which Schwab provides The Planner’s Edge, LLC with services related to your account. Schwab does not review The Planner’s Edge, LLC website(s), and makes no representation regarding the content of the Website(s). The information contained in The Planner’s Edge, LLC website should not be considered to be either a recommendation by Schwab or a solicitation of any offer to purchase or sell any securities.

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