Financial Planning

Why do we save? Why do we put our hard earned money at risk? For most of us, it is the only way we will ever be able to achieve the goals that we have set for ourselves and our families. The average annual cost of tuition, room and board at a private college in the 2020 academic year was about $53,980.  

Here is a link for more information: https://www.collegedata.com/. Education costs have been rising faster than the general inflation rate for years, which makes it even more difficult to save the money needed to cover the costs. As a result, more and more of our children are graduating with insurmountable debt.

If that wasn’t enough, we also need to save money for our retirement. The amount that we need to save to retire makes college look inexpensive. With the exception of government work, most defined benefit plans are gone. We can no longer expect to work at a company for 30 or 40 years and walk away with a guaranteed monthly payment that will allow us to continue our lifestyle. Today, 401k plans are the norm. The onus is on us to save for our retirement. Here is a link to a site where you can learn how much you would need to save on your own to replicate a New York State pension: https://www.empirecenter.org/publications/pension-calculator/.

At Marathon Mission®, we use industry leading software to help us answer the age-old questions of “will I run out of money?”, and “can I afford this?” In recent years we have seen amazing advancements in computing ability and technology in the financial planning field. We can now take into consideration numerous factors such as: federal and state taxes, social security, pensions, investments, inflation, risk tolerance, health care, vacation homes, varying rates of return using portfolio standard deviation, and the list goes on. The result of all of this data crunching and predictive analytics provides a probability analysis that we could only dream about a decade ago.

There are six steps to the financial planning process:

  1. Establishing and defining the client-planner relationship
  2. Gathering client data including goals
  3. Analyzing and evaluating the client’s current financial status
  4. Developing and presenting recommendations and/or alternatives
  5. Implementing the recommendations
  6. Monitoring the recommendations

The main financial planning areas that we focus on are:

  • Investment planning
  • Retirement planning
  • Insurance planning and risk management
  • Education planning
  • Tax planning
  • Estate planning
  • Employee benefits planning