Financial Planning
1. Care more about you and your money than anyone who doesn’t share your last name.
2. Proactively adopt and implement a Fiduciary Standard in relation to you, your family, your assets, your financial future.
3. Ask questions to understand your needs and objectives.
4. Help you determine where you are at present.
5. Guide you to think about areas of your financial life you may not have considered.
6. Help organize your financial situation.
7. Formalize your goals and put them in writing for you.
8. Help you prioritize your financial opportunities.
9. Help you determine realistic goals.
10. Study possible alternatives that could meet your goals.
11. Make specific recommendations to help you meet your goals.
12. Implement those recommendations.
13. Suggest creative alternatives that you may not have considered.
14. Review and recommend life and other insurance policies to protect your family.
15. Assist you in setting up a personal or company retirement plan.
16. Assist you in devising a plan to protect your assets from being depleted by a judgment resulting from a frivolous lawsuit.
17. Perform a detailed analysis and recommend when to start taking Social Security benefits.
18. Address how much retirement income you can take from your investments without running out of money during your lifetime.
19. Assist in preparing an estate plan for you.
20. Review your children’s custodial accounts and 529 education savings plans.
21. Help you determine your IRA Required Minimum Distributions.
22. Partners with you to accomplish doing the things you know you ought to do, and don’t feel like doing.
Investments
23. Prepare an asset allocation for you so you can achieve the best rate of return for a given level of risk tolerance.
24. Continuously researches and monitors money managers and mutual fund managers to insure the best fit for your investment needs.
25. Stay up to date on changes in the investment world.
26. Monitor your investments.
27. Review your existing annuities and similar deferred accounts.
28. Review your investments in your company 401(k), Simple IRA, or 403(b) plans.
29. Review your existing IRAs.
30. Review and revise portfolios as conditions change.
31. Guide you through difficult periods in the stock market by sharing historical perspectives.
32. Improve your overall investment performance.
33. Look “inside” your mutual funds to compare how many of their holdings duplicate each other.
34. Convert your investments to lifetime income.
35. Help you evaluate the differences in risk levels between various fixed-income investments such as government bonds and corporate bonds.
36. Help handle exchanges, tenders, and special stock dividends.
37. Help facilitate the holding and warehousing of mutual funds, stocks, bonds, and other securities.
38. Record your cost basis on securities.
39. Provide investment advice without the bias that comes with receiving a kickback in the form of investment-related commissions or other performance compensation.
40. Provide you with personal investment analysis.
41. Determine the risk level of your existing portfolio.
42. Help you consolidate and simplify your investments.
43. Provide you with alternative investment options.
44. Show you how to access your statements and other information online.
45. Provide access to low-cost institutional mutual fund shares.
46. With 401k, 403b, and 457 plans becoming more critical to our future financial viability, we can help you make appropriate, risk-tolerant decisions about which blend of investments in your retirement plan(s) might be appropriate for all your life stages.
47. Help you decide when to buy, when to hold, and when to sell. By following tried-and-true asset allocation processes, guided by the Nobel-Prize-winning Modern Portfolio Theory, we can help guide you to the proper allocation of your financial assets throughout our time together.
48. Help you choose specific assets. By doing extensive research on the available financial assets (mutual funds, ETFs, stocks, bonds, etc.) we help you choose the appropriate assets for each class in your portfolio.
49. Help reduce management and transaction costs. We help you reduce mutual fund and ETF managerial and transaction expenses, allowing you to keep more of your money growing for you.
50. Help you understand and protect against risks. Help you reduce the potential impact of falling markets by integrating your risk tolerance, time frame, and goals/objectives into a properly diversified portfolio across appropriate asset classes.
51. Evaluate new investment opportunities. When investment opportunities arise, KFG is already alert to the potential “fit” into your portfolio, following your stated risk tolerance and your goals.
Real Estate Investments
52. Help you understand real estate investments. Our 45 years of real estate experience means we understand even the most complex real estate investments.
53. Evaluate your existing returns on real estate investments, including returns on equity, capitalization rates, and IRR’s.
54. Help you decide when refinancing is in your best interest.
55. Walk you through the complexities of a 1031 tax-deferred exchange.
56. Help you complete a 721-tax deferred exchange into an UPREIT when your situation warrants it.
57. Help you interview and select a competent real estate professional.
58. Help you understand the mechanics of valuating real estate and business opportunities.
59. Help you understand and negotiate condemnation proceedings.
60. Help you negotiate the minefields of a real estate offer in a timely manner.
61. Help you apply techniques and strategies for asset protection to real estate.
62. Help lower your risk of judgments attaching to your real estate investments from an unrelated and frivolous lawsuit.
Taxes
63. Suggest alternatives to lower your taxes.
64. Review your tax returns with an eye to possible savings in the future.
65. Stay up to date on tax law changes.
66. Helps you reduce your taxes during working years.
67. Re-position investments to take full advantage of tax law provisions.
68. Understand the differences between various entities like S or C corporations, LLCs, FLPs, land trusts, and asset protection trusts.
69. Work with your tax and legal advisers to help you meet your financial goals. Person to Person.
70. Monitor changes in your life and family situation.
71. Proactively keep in touch with you.
72. Remain only a telephone call, email, or text away to answer financial questions for you.
73. Serve as a human glossary of financial terms such as Modern Portfolio Theory, asset allocation, FLPs, P/E ratio, and asset class diversification.
74. Strive to drop any agenda of what you “should” or “should not” do and be exquisite listeners.
75. Provide referrals to other professionals, such as accountants, attorneys, lenders, bookkeepers, coaches, insurance agents, long-term care providers, bank trust officers, and a host of others.
76. Refer you to banking establishments for loan and trust alternatives.
77. Suggest alternatives to increase your income during retirement.
78. Listen and provide feedback in a way that a magazine or newsletter writer does not.
79. Share knowledge (while maintaining absolute confidentiality) gained from the experiences of dozens of clients who have faced circumstances similar to yours over the years.
80. Help educate you, your partner, parents, children, and grandchildren about investments and financial concepts.
81. Distribute information, including our own blog posts, that discuss significant and/or new financial concepts.
82. Help with the continuity of your family’s financial plan through generations.
83. Facilitate the transfer of investments from individual names to a trust, or from a trust or retirement plan to beneficiaries.
84. Keep you on track to accomplish your most important goals and let you know when modification is needed.
85. Identify your savings shortfalls and excesses.
86. Identify your overspending.
87. Develop and monitor a strategy for debt reduction.
88. Educate you on retirement issues.
89. Educate you on estate planning issues.
90. Educate you on college savings and financial aid options.
91. Provide advice you can trust and act in your best interest in all your financial matters.
92. Serve as a wise sounding board for ideas you are considering.
93. Tell you the truth, always—even when you are reluctant to hear it.
94. Become a steward for the financial success of you and your family.
95. Help bring you Peace of Mind.
96. Recommend appropriate changes of direction in your portfolio.
97. Provide an emotional firewall between you and the often-alarming media.
98. Bring to your “table” extensive expertise, education, and real-life experience.
99. Offer sophisticated and up-to-date training, knowledge, and skill.
100. Follow fiduciary standards under which you are a client, not a customer.
101. Help protect you against irrationally optimistic expectations during bull market run-ups.
102. Help you establish realistic investment objectives and maintain them in both good and bad market periods.
103. Educate you about financial concepts.
104. Protect you from emotion-driven behavior that can reduce your market returns.
105. Bring you a disciplined approach toward achieving your most important financial and life goals.
106. Network with leaders in our field through professional associations.