Financial Planning In its broadest terms, financial planning is the long-term process of wisely managing your affairs so you can achieve your life's goals. Through our "wealth coaching" process, Bolen | Dodson & Associates will help you define your aspirations and negotiate the financial issues that inevitably crop up in every stage of life. The process involves setting goals, examining your current financial status, creating a plan for accomplishing what you want, and then following through. Sounds simple enough - just common sense - but too few people do it. This is not incidental stuff. A person who plans is more than twice as likely to get where he or she wants to go, financially and otherwise, than the person who doesn't plan.  Here are just a few reasons to consider hiring Bolen | Dodson & Associates for your Financial Planning and Wealth Coaching needs: As Wealth Coaches, we will help you identify what is important in your lives and help you prioritize your goals. How many people actually take the time soulfully to establish their goals and then see the plan through to accomplishment? Working with a coach improves the odds of success. We will help you bring the focus of your lives from retirement to the present. Don’t settle, be inspired. We will help. Disorganization is a major cause of stress for most people. Do you feel as though all of your financial affairs are in good working order and easily accessible in case of emergency? We can help you consolidate all of the miscellaneous items of your financial life, leaving you with a sense of peace and confidence.  As your trusted advisor, we can work with clients to coordinate the advice you are getting from various sources.   How much insurance do you really need and what kind? Are your desires actually making it through the lawyer to the Will, Trusts or other estate planning documents? Do you have a diversified portfolio that is beating its benchmarks? Are you on track to meet your goals? Bolen | Dodson & Associates will provide integration between financial disciplines making 1+1 add up to more than 2. People are often emotional about their investment decisions. According to a 2004 study by Dalbar, Inc., investment return is far more dependent on investor behavior than on fund performance. From 1984 to 2003, the S&P 500 increased an average of 12.98% per year while the “average” equity investor saw annualized returns of just 3.5%. Individual investors tend to chase performance, buy at tops out of greed (recall 1998-1999) and sell at bottoms out of fear (recall 2002.)  Bolen | Dodson & Associates has an objective, disciplined investment approach. We do not make emotional decisions. Proper diversification can increase returns while simultaneously lowering risk. Are you investing according to your individual risk tolerance level? Would you know if you are?  According to some of the latest market research, people are only saving about 2% of income. After all, mainstream media doesn’t rave about incentives to save for retirement in comparison to the benefits placed on purchasing the latest and greatest products. We will help you view your savings habits as just another monthly item. We will keep your Life Vision in front of you, inspiring you to succeed. Pay yourself first and over time it will make the difference between retiring on your terms or not.  Bolen | Dodson & Associates will help you break large, seemingly impossible goals into manageable, monthly increments. An old Bonanza show once had Ben Cartwright teaching Hoss how to manage the ranch. He had Hoss pick up a handful of sticks and attempt to break them all at once only to find it impossible. However, it barely required any effort to break each stick individually. Any project is manageable “one stick at a time.”   Apply this concept to goal setting. Even though the “big picture” may seem impossible and completely out of your realm of reality, anything is achievable when broken down into pieces. We make goal setting manageable by separating the individual sticks and breaking them one at a time. Sound financial planning isn't much fun, yet it is critical to a future free of debt and doubt. Planning sees you through your golden years in style. The sea-worthy financial ship depends on maximizing employee and retirement benefits and fully planning for retirement and the passing of one's estate. It depends upon sound investments, minimizing taxes and adequate insurance. Bolen | Dodson & Associates will discuss each of these with you to assess their relative importance to your specific situation. Build your assets first, and let the assets do the work, rather than you. Remember the movie "Pay it Forward" with Kevin Spacey? The movie's premise is to do a good deed for someone in advance, and ask him or her to "pay it forward." We take the same concept and apply it to retirement planning. For example, take one vacation this year and pay forward the second one to a future date, or pay forward your new car a few years. Simple compounding will let you buy two cars down the road, or take three vacations later, with the same funds, grown over time, that you would spend today. It's not delayed gratification, which nobody likes. It's just paying it forward - getting more bang for the buck - which everyone loves. back to the top