Family Matters

Linda and Carl Bernstein

Proud Grandparents Who Travel

Carl and Linda have seven grandchildren in three states, and spend the better part of the year living out of suitcases. They want to make sure their future is filled with time spent with their family, not focused on day-to-day financial management.

Like many of our clients, Carl and Linda worked hard to achieve financial independence. While they’re not saddled with worries about how long their income will last in retirement, Carl enjoys following the market and being involved in his finances. Given the constantly changing financial and tax landscape, he was less than enthusiastic about the amount of time he was spending just keeping up, let alone checking account balances among different financial institutions, juggling account statements, and tracking spending, investment returns, and dividend payments. He felt like he had taken on a new job in retirement simply trying to keep a handle on the couple’s finances when all he really wanted was more time to toss a football with his grandsons or watch his granddaughters’ soccer games.

While in town, Carl and Linda meet with us in our Ohio office, but when traveling they use our online meeting software, enabling them to have a face-to-face virtual meeting with us in our Ohio office even though they were visiting family in California.

To help simplify financial and investment management, Carl and Linda subscribe to our innovative WealthVision™ financial management system. We showed them how WealthVision’s online financial organization, account aggregation, and reporting system could work to provide organization across their entire financial life, while allowing Planned Financial Services to provide oversight of their finances and investments, offering:

A comprehensive, aggregated view of all of their financial assets all in one place, including bank accounts, investment assets, annuities, and insurance policies as well as the seven 529 plans they established for their grandkids.  

Their personal net worth and real time asset values for their financial plan across multiple accounts as well as budgeting and spending if needed.

A secure online vault for storing critical papers, such as copies of their passports, will and estate planning documents, insurance policies, income tax returns, and photos of their most valuable assets (which in their case includes pictures of the grandkids alongside images of the rare coins Carl began collecting at age 8).

Financial analysis of their current plan set against their benchmarks along with scenario planning to view various income distribution scenarios and to stress test their plan against unwanted surprises such as a prolonged bear market or a long-term care event.

WealthVision™ provides Carl and Linda with the ability to effortlessly track household and travel spending against income, resulting in a consistently clear understanding of their spending from one month to the next or year-over-year. It also provides a platform for categorizing their spending, which helps immensely with both budgeting and tax planning—especially for keeping track of cash gifts made to their three children and their spouses, and seven grandchildren across birthdays, holidays, graduations, and other special occasions. Most of all, it provides both Carl and Linda with more time to do what they want, when they want, with the people they love the most.