WITHOUT A IS JUST A A
COMMITMENT. WISDOM.
A goal without a plan is just a wish -- a true statement that applies to many things in life, especially retirement. At Athena Wealth Strategies we consider ourselves first and foremost retirement strategists. If you’re not sure what to expect in retirement, you’re not alone. Because we are living longer and staying active longer, the very definition of retirement is changing.
As you prepare for retirement, you face a complex set of money and wealth management issues including investment options, healthcare expenses, making sure the money lasts, coordinating withdrawals, and planning for the unexpected just to name a few.
Together, our financial strategists we will help to define your personal road map and goals for retirement while we aim to maximize your finances for the future. Athena Wealth Strategies is a fee-based firm of financial advisors that provides you with financial analysis and advice with one big goal in mind -- helping you plan your life for the future.
Commitment
At Athena Wealth Strategies, everything begins with our commitment to our clients. First and foremost, we are dedicated to providing you with objective, knowledgeable advice that helps you take control of your financial situation to achieve the goals that matter to you. All Athena Wealth Strategies planners share the following core commitments, and our goal is to:
• Provide objective advice that puts our clients’ needs first.
• Listen, learn and care about your goals for your future and provide personalized recommendations that take your concerns and priorities into account.
• Make sure you understand the recommendations we are making and why we are making them.
GUIDANCE. STRATEGY
• Deliver ongoing reviews and updates to progress towards your goals and adjust to changing situations and circumstances.
• Be approachable and accessible to our clients.
• Demonstrate our integrity and mastery of our field by holding advanced designations, such as the Chartered Financial Consultant
• Stay up to date on the rapidly changing opportunities and regulations in the financial world.
Independent, individualized advice with a focus on long term goals and being there with you to realize them: this is the Athena Wealth Strategies commitment.
Wisdom
It is easy to get overwhelmed with the changing landscape and alphabet soup of the financial world. While we are committed to remaining current on new and anticipated changes, it is our experience that allows us to turn this industry and research knowledge into wisdom and insight, which enables us to discern what is true, right, or lasting. Our team brings the perspective gained by 70 years of combined experience in the investment industry. We know what questions to ask, and how to find the answers. We use this approach to study and analyze your ‘big picture’ and to create a plan that meets your needs.
Guidance
A compass can tell you which direction to go and a GPS gives you possible routes to get there. At Athena Wealth Strategies, our goal is to provide the financial and economic guidance so you know the best way to reach your destination. We focus on you and your needs – not just your financial situation, but your
overall priorities and life goals. We don’t rely on a questionnaire or a formula. We work with you individually to understand what you want and need, and we provide clarity about what can be achieved, and how. Our team specializes in:
• Comprehensive financial planning
• Strategies for business owners
• Evaluation and review of existing retirement plans and implementation of new plans
• Investment Analysis
• Retirement planning and distribution strategies
As part of your decision-making team, we serve as a resource and a sounding board as you face important decision points in your life.
Strategy
Strategy is our strength and the cornerstone of our firm. When you meet with us, you are not talking with a sales person. You are talking with a strategic, analytical partner who is going to guide you to the best possible financial solutions for you and your family -- in the near term and the long term. Consider these questions, which we often hear from our clients:
• Should I use extra income towards saving for retirement or paying down my mortgage?
• Is it better to take social security now or later?
• Which pension option would be best for me and my family?
The answers to these questions vary, based on your situation. We will work with you find out what best suits yours, based on your risk tolerance, economic circumstances and life goals.
Commitment, wisdom, guidance and strategy – these are our core values and founding principles. We live by them each and every day.
Comprehensive Financial Planning
What Matters To You
A financial plan is not merely a set of numbers and projections. It is a document of your life, your goals for the future, and what matters to you. Although most people have goals and hopes for their future, relatively few take the time required to put together a plan that will show them what they need to achieve them, or alert them to potential risks lurking along the way. Owning a home, passing on a family business, being able to afford to travel or to stay in place in retirement… without taking action and following a plan, there is no way to know if or how these goals can be reached
Many people are able to plan for and achieve some financial goals on their own. Those who have bought homes or saved for a college education know the discipline, forethought, and research that can be required just to meet a single objective. Planning for one’s entire life and its legacy requires a high degree of specialized knowledge and, often, the objectivity of a professional who can help you decide what matters most to you and how much you can achieve with the resources you have.
A goal without a plan is just a wish.
A 360° Picture of Your Future
As a 360° picture, a full financial plan looks at your current budget, your future needs, and at what you will leave behind. It can determine if you are saving enough to meet your goals and whether you are saving into the right type of accounts to meet your needs. Proper planning can reduce your tax liability now or in the future for you and your heirs. It can uncover hidden risks, such as legal liability or a long-term disability, and determine whether you have adequate insurance to protect yourself against them.
Without a plan, you are moving forward blindly into the future without knowing if your actions today are sufficient to meet your goals tomorrow. Meeting with an experienced financial planner can make sure that your actions now are part of a larger strategy. Knowing where you are currently and where you are headed can not only give you a sense of security that you are on the right track today, but satisfaction in the future when you have achieved your goals. Without a financial plan that can be implemented, your goals are only wishes or dreams.
We Are Your Advocate & Unbiased Resource
At Athena Wealth Strategies, we work as your advocate both to coordinate your financial strategy and to distill the world of information and resources in the financial marketplace. We team with many companies and professionals, researching the information they provide as well as their investment or insurance products, utilizing their legal and other expert staff, and putting to work the information garnered to best serve our clients’ specific needs. In addition to our alliances with these and other large firms, we align ourselves with other experts locally such as CPAs, estate attorneys, and even other financial advisors. When you have a trusted professional you and your family have relied on, we work with them to make sure that your financial plan is coordinated according to your needs and goals.
A New View of Retirement
Retirement has changed over the past few decades, and, perhaps even more importantly, how we fund and plan for retirement has changed. Employer pensions, along with Social Security, used to provide the bulk of retirees’ income. For most Americans, gone are the days of spending an entire career at one company and receiving a set monthly amount in retirement.
Although this change is often looked at with dismay by employees, with this freedom has come a tremendous opportunity for many people: the freedom to work for many employers and even in many different types of careers, and the ability to defer and strategically plan one’s tax liability. In addition, although many monthly pension payments appear generous at first, over the course of today’s longer retirements the increasing cost of living can erode them to the point where they no longer cover basic necessities. For all retirees, inflation is a dangerous but silent risk, and this is especially true for those whose retirement income is dependent on fixed defined-benefit pensions.
With this freedom has also come risk, and the responsibility to manage that risk. The shift to 401(k) plans has shifted investment
A goal without a plan is just a wish.
risk from the employer to the employee and has increased the amount of knowledge and planning required to be able to afford a successful retirement. The responsibility to plan for retirement is a great one and many workers do not have the time or desire, let alone the knowledge, to do the research and work required.
Take the First Step
The first step is generally to take a full inventory of what you have and what you will need. Although time consuming, it is only with a full account of your current situation that you will know what else may be needed to achieve your goals. Working with a financial planner can help you know what information you need and how to find it as well as providing the motivation needed to make this a priority.
Once we have determined how much income will be received and how much will be required, savings may be needed to fill in the gap. The planners at Athena Wealth Strategies have experience helping to guide clients through this process and are committed to looking at retirement savings as part of a strategy
to save, invest, and distribute assets in a way that best works for you, rather than solely as a sum of money to be invested.
What we give you is not a list of recommended investments, but a snapshot of how your retirement looks today as well as the steps you can take to help make that picture match your goals.
Distribution Strategies
When you are years away from retirement, you have time to withstand market declines. The emotional impact of a downturn is not nearly as stark when the money will not be needed until years down the line. In fact, the financial impact, too, has less of an effect when your accounts have years left to recover. As you approach and enter retirement, however, the effect of any loss multiplies. Not only is it harder to watch your account balances drop in a bad year when you know you will soon be depending on this money, but statistically, as well, market volatility matters more once distributions are being taken. In your working years, not only do you have time to weather the market’s storms, but if you are contributing to a retirement plan you can benefit from purchasing investments at low share prices.
The Working Years
In your working years, what matters most is your average return. If a historic market drop is followed by a recovery and you are able to retain or increase your stock exposure throughout this time, your account balances will recover with the rest of the market. The day you start withdrawing the money you have
A goal without a plan is just a wish.
saved is the day this changes. Whether you start your retirement with good years in the market or bad ones, it is how you react in the bad ones that can make all the difference in how much will remain for you years down the road. While rules of thumb for withdrawal rates can provide a back- of- the -envelope impression of whether we have saved enough, a withdrawal rate alone can rarely be enough to tell people what they really want to know: “Will I be OK?”
Working With Athena Wealth Strategies
Working with an Athena Wealth Strategies planner will give you a full picture of what else might affect your ability to retire. We will look at your particular situation – how much you need to support your basic and discretionary expenses, what sorts of income you have coming in and how that will change over the course of retirement, how much risk you are comfortable taking with your investments, and to what degree that risk will affect your possible results. A planner will conduct an analysis of your Social Security income and any defined benefit pension income,
review the different strategies you can implement, and coordinate these funding sources with the income generated from your retirement assets.
By creating a detailed retirement income model, we can determine not only your situation but how to address any shortfalls or risks. We use various approaches to analyze whether your assets are being best used to give you the life you have saved for. This can include strategically planning distributions so that assets do not need to be sold in a downturn, planning for flexibility in distributions, or outsourcing market and longevity risk. We work with you and your situation to determine which approaches best fit your unique needs.
Strategies for Business Owners
As a business owner, you know that your personal financial future is intertwined with the success of your business. At Athena Wealth Strategies, we assist business owners in three key ways: Financial Strategy and Analysis; Compensation and Benefits; and Business Succession Planning.
Financial Strategy and Analysis
Business owners not only face many of the same financial decisions and questions as individuals, but additional, and often more complicated, matters. We can serve as a financial consultant to your organization and assist with important financial decisions.
Compensation and Benefits
When talented key workers are offered a job, they expect to be offered more than just a salary. They look for a package of benefits including health care, additional life insurance policies, long term disability insurance, executive deferred compensation plans, and retirement plans. Having these options in your offer package can increase the chance that a sought-after individual will take a particular job and/or that a current employee will stay with the company. As your financial planner, we work with your
A goal without a plan is just a wish.
team of advisors in helping you develop that key compensation package. Our approach to designing and managing your company’s retirement plan includes providing you with technical expertise, a risk management process, investment choices, administration options, and enhanced fiduciary oversight to help you meet regulatory obligations in today’s complex environment.
Business Succession Planning
Many business owners do not plan for their business to have a future without them. Without a plan for your business to continue without you, it almost certainly will not. In addition, this failure to ensure your business can operate in your absence prevents you from extracting any value from the years of hard work and time that you have invested into it. , Working with a planner to create a succession plan can help create value for your business in your absence --- before you leave your business to enjoy retirement or due to unforeseen death or disability. This value can also provide a saleable asset to fund your retirement or leave to your heirs.
There are numerous considerations that go into developing a business succession plan, some of which need to be considered
long before you plan to retire. Perhaps you want a family member to inherit and manage it, or you want the family to own the business but have it run by a trained management team. If you are looking to sell your business, you will want to be sure that it is selling for its fair market value. Whatever your objective, there may be estate tax considerations for you and your heirs as well. For a business succession plan to be successful, you need to be thinking about this years before a triggering event, whether it is to groom your successor and/or set up the business in a way that would be attractive to an outside buyer. If you plan on selling the business, you will need to get a valuation to determine its market worth. You may need an agreement in place to formalize your successor’s commitment to purchasing your ownership share and that agreement may need to contain a mechanism to provide sufficient funding to make that purchase.
Without proper planning, the value in your business disappears when you do. At Athena Wealth Strategies, we can work with you and your team of advisors to make sure you and your loved ones benefit from all the hard work you put forth in building a successful business.
WEALTH STRATEGIES
At Athena Wealth Strategies, we work as your advocate both to coordinate your financial strategy and to distill the world of information and resources in the financial marketplace. We team with many companies and professionals, researching the information they provide as well as their investment or insurance products, utilizing their legal and other experiencedstaff, and putting to work the information garnered to best serve our clients’ specific needs. In addition to our alliances with these and other large firms, we align ourselves with other experts locally such as CPAs, estate attorneys, and even other financial advisors. When you have a trusted professional you and your family have relied on, we work with them to make sure that your financial plan is coordinated according to your needs and goals.
Our World of Resources
Through our broker-dealer, Lincoln Financial Advisors, we have access to the resources of a large firm and the ability to use a world of established, trusted partner companies and investment options both within and outside of Lincoln. We regularly research and review the options available and the decision of where to invest your money is always made with your needs and preferences in mind.
Experience and Insight
Having access to all these resources and knowing what to do with that information is where we come in. Our analytical ability and problem-solving skills, as well as our experience, allows us to weed through the thousands of articles and opinions, collect useful insights, and put it all together in a way that best serves our clients. Our knowledge library contains some of the information we have gathered and found to be particularly useful, with credit given to the writing firm or individual. We keep this library alive with both classics and new information.
