Effective financial planning is a lifetime effort. Financial advisors work with families to get a grasp on their finances and manage them across all phases of earning and into retirement.

When you look to recruit a financial advisor, it’s important to select a professional capable of guiding you across the many milestones in life and helping you navigate the ways those events uniquely impact your financial picture.

At Texas Financial and Retirement, we aim to positively change the financial and retirement lives of the families we represent forever.

But there are many ways and places to start.

An experienced financial advisor should be expected to help provide your family strategies in several main categories, including creating and growing wealth, protecting and preserving your savings, creating a comfortable retirement income, and planning for the distribution of your estate in the most tax efficient manner.

Here’s some of what we offer our clients and what you should look for in a financial adviser.

Create and grow wealth

Before you have a nest egg of savings to protect and preserve, you must create and grow it.

Our first Mission point at Texas Financial and Retirement deals with helping you get started in the best possible manner, financially speaking. We can assist in planning your investments so that you create wealth and see it increase over time.

Since we can’t count on winning a major lottery and suddenly going from rags to riches, we need a plan to reach our personal riches goal. It’s not magic, and it won’t happen accidentally. A good financial plan for a lifetime will help you to create and grow your wealth – which leads eventually to a better and more comfortable future retirement.

The best time to focus on accumulation is in your 20s, 30s, 40s and early 50s — the busy years leading up to retirement.

Protect and preserve their life savings

But wealth building and growth is not the only thing you need to focus on leading up to retirement. When we’re younger and can reasonably expect to have decades of more wealth-producing work ahead of us, we take more risks with our wealth – because we have the chance for greater returns on our investments.

As we begin to approach our planned retirement years, however, we become more fiscally conservative. Moving away from a focus on growing our money or “accumulation,” our primary focus turns toward keeping our wealth, or “preservation.” We still want to see some growth, but we need to take fewer risks since we don’t have the income-producing years ahead of us to recover from any losses.

A financial advisor should help you make this shift of focus at the right time and in the right way. We want the transition to be as smooth as possible for you, but also want to ensure you have completed that shift at the correct time in your financial life – getting the most growth possible while eliminating inappropriate risk.

Create a comfortable retirement income

In an ideal world, we’d all have enough to do whatever we wanted throughout our retirement, for as long as we lived. But things don’t always work out that way.

Our goal for the families of our clients is to help them in creating a comfortable retirement. We work to arrange the finances which exist at the time our clients enter their retirement in such a way as to maximize the lifetime benefits and help them achieve their personal goals.

No one wants to run out of money during retirement – we want our retirement funds to last as long as we do. And many people also want to be able to leave something extra behind for their loved ones after they pass, which brings up our final point…

Plan for the distribution of your estate in the most tax efficient manner

Since the 1700s, people have noted that the only two things certain in life are death and taxes. And you can probably count on “death taxes” taking a chunk out of your estate if you don’t have professional assistance to navigate the ever-changing tax laws.

The more you pay in taxes, the less will remain for those who inherit from your estate, and it would be a shame to see the results of all your hard work and planning go to waste at the end of your life. Better to be able to pass more of it along to those whom you have chosen.

At Texas Financial and Retirement, that’s our goal for this fourth Mission point – to make the best tax planning efforts up front so you can pass more of your wealth on to your heirs.

If this sounds like what you’d like to see for your family’s life, contact James Holloway, Sr. and the team at Texas Financial and Retirement today. You can call (903)534-5477 or email us at bestclients@texasfinancialandretirement.com .