Bui Financial Advisory, LLC

We help you set attainable goals for the near term and for the future, build your upside, protect your downside. We set aside a session to focus on your goals and dreams, and help to put timelines to these goals.

Insurance Review

We will review your insurance needs, current coverage and deductibles as well as examine policies before you purchase them. This includes life, health, disability, auto, long term care home and business insurance.

Estate Planning

We can help you think through how you want your children taken care of and assets titled and divided, with emphasis on reducing estate taxes and probate costs. We work with estate planning attorneys to make sure you have a clear plan in place that you understand.

We find that this is a large goal and focal point for most clients. We run a variety of "what if" scenarios. We want to make sure we take into consideration inflation, your spending plan, social security benefits, your required IRA distributions, your tax bracket, and any pensions when we do our planning.

We review your cash flow, credit, spending patterns and develop an annual budget. This is imperative to knowing how much you will need to have in retirement, and also in determining whether there is any surplus that can be utilized towards reaching your goals. We help you simplify your financial life so you can concentrate on growing your finances instead of merely managing them.

• How much do you need in retirement? What can you expect your expenses to be?
• What will you receive in Social Security benefits? When is the best age to collect?
• What will you receive from employee benefits? When is the best age to collect?
• Which are the best retirement vehicles to save in? What growth rate do you need
  to reach your retirement goals?

Investment Counseling

We will continually strive to find the most cost efficient investments whereby you can achieve your financial goals. The financial plan does include advice about specific investments and investment strategies.

We help you by acting as a buffer between your emotions and your investment behavior. We have seen how greed, hype, fear, despair and pride slip right past the governors of the rational mind and result in investment decisions that range from bizarre to self-destructive. The great thing about having a financial advisor is that you don't have that direct emotional connection with your portfolio. A financial advisor looks at the situation objectively. They remind you of the investment policy statement you came up with together and why those policies needn't change because of some extraneous factor(s).

We spend time developing an Investment Policy Statement, taking into consideration your risk profile, time horizon, life cycle, etc. It's important that you understand how your investments should be allocated, the different types of investments available to you, and the appropriate expectations for those investments. We think it makes sense to spend a few minutes in the "parking lot" devising your itinerary and reviewing your "investment road map," then carelessly darting into different investments and ending up with a "hap hazard" portfolio. We find that when clients take the time with us to develop this blueprint, when the market heads south, they are able to stay focused on their plan, knowing that they have already considered all the obstacles that could impact them and can stay true to their course.

We also carefully review each of your current investments in detail and let you know our opinion of whether you should sell something (and if so, if there would be any consequences to doing so, such as tax gains or surrender charges) or keep it. We want you to understand exactly why we are making our recommendations. Remember, since we receive no third party fees (such as commissions) we have no reason to recommend that you sell (or buy) anything that we don't think is in your best interest. At the end of this meeting, clients are given a list of action items and discussion notes. Our second meeting is scheduled for 4-6 weeks later.

In our second meeting, we review our accomplishments thus far, and answer any questions that you might have from our first meeting. Then we begin to recommend specific investment strategies for your goals. We take into consideration the new money that you will be adding to your investments through your retirement plan at work, or your IRA and how this money will be integrated into your current investment plan. We review your asset allocation with you and make recommendations as to "what you should hold where." For example, we may recommend that you take advantage of using a good Small Cap Value fund offered in your 401(k) and as a result, not put that particular asset class in your Brokerage account. We start with the "big picture" and slowly make our way to each individual investment and where it fits into your plan. For those clients who are on retainer, we will continue to watch the managers of the funds we recommend and make changes as you and we feel necessary. We will also make sure that your allocations remain consistent with your plan.
 

Tax Advice and Tax Planning

We include tax planning and preparation because we know that without reducing the amount you owe in taxes, the road to financial independence is much longer. We find that the most successful and effective plans are those where everything is working together toward one common goal. Goals are reached much faster when ALL pieces of the train are all running on the same track.

Are you withholding enough to avoid tax penalties? How much can we estimate that you will owe? What can we do now to reduce that amount? How can you pay less money in taxes, so instead you can re-allocate those funds toward reaching your goals faster? How much do you need to take for your required minimum distributions? Do you have capital losses or gains that you should consider taking before year-end? If so, should you buy the investment back again? When?

I often tell clients that there are several reasons why we do comprehensive planning and this is just one of them.
While we would never promise you a 20% return on your investments (and no one should!), we feel that with good tax planning, if we can help save you $1 in taxes, in essence, that's approximately a 20% return!

We strongly believe in tax planning and, with retainer clients, will do a year-end tax planning appointment and analyze whether they should change their payroll withholding, whether they should make any changes to their portfolio, and what are the best year-end tax saving strategies for them to implement.