Preserving Wealth

protect your assets

Once you’ve built a portfolio of investments and other assets, you’ll want a strategy to preserve your wealth. You need to protect your investments against unexpected emergencies or other factors that could impact your financial future.

How to protect your assets

Prepare for medical emergencies – Be sure you have adequate insurance and a plan for managing your assets if you or a family member becomes seriously ill or disabled.

Consider longevity – Increase your savings so you can live comfortably in your eighties, nineties, or even beyond.

Manage your portfolio – Make sure you have a variety of asset types. This can help reduce the impacts of high inflation and market declines on your investment accounts.

Have alternative plans – Consider best- and worst-case economic scenarios and determine how your financial plans may change if some of your assets lose value.

Keep personal assets separate – If you or your family owns a small business, consider ways to structure your business to protect your personal assets.

three plans for your future

Insurance alone won’t guarantee you a secure financial future. There are three additional tools that we strongly suggest you develop for yourself: an investing plan, a financial plan, and an estate plan.

Once you’re familiar with these basics, think about working with investing, financial, and estate planning professionals to learn more and to get help in creating plans that work for you.

An investing plan considers your goals, your risk tolerance, the kinds of investments you want to make, and how you plan to balance your portfolio (the group of investments you own).

Financial planning means creating a long-term vision and clear goals for the financial future you want. It means taking a look at how the major pieces of your financial world — your job or business, your spending plan, the major assets you own, and the debts you owe — all add up into one complete picture. Real estate, insurance, and investments are part of it, too. Creating a financial plan helps you see what you’re trying to achieve and how all of the parts fit together to help you reach your goals.

An estate plan tells everyone how you want your property to be managed and who you want to inherit it when you die. It’s very important in case you become totally disabled before you die. Wills and trusts are part of an estate plan.

Creating an estate plan can also help you define your legacy — the gifts you’d like to make during your life and afterward to make a positive impact on your community.

If you don’t create an estate plan, the money you leave behind might have fees and carry taxes of up to 60% or more! The state will control the distribution of your estate rather than your heirs. Instead of leaving your family with a sense of security, you may be leaving them confused, frustrated, and at odds with each other! Business owners, in particular, should be very conscious of the need to create an estate plan, because frequently much of your wealth in tied up in the business.