The Effective Financial Plan Starts with an Effective Financial Planner

Information is easy to find. It comes at you from every direction. But translating the fluid array of often-conflicting data into the knowledge needed to build and maintain high-performance wealth-management plan is another story. That’s where a financial planner comes in.

You cannot avoid being bombarded with financial chatter all day, every day.

It pours out of your smartphone and tablet. It dominates front pages. Radio updates every half hour. Entire satellite channels are devoted to it. And cable channels fill hours with experts and analysts “discussing” market trends and prospects.

How do you make sense of that?

Put a financial planner on your side

Financial planners have the expertise, integrity and competence to sort the information, understand it and use it to tailor a financial plan tailored to help achieve your goals.

But there’s more to finding the right financial planner for you.

That professional takes uncommon care to understand you, your tolerance for risk now and the financial resources you’ll need in the future.

Those personal insights are critical to create and maintain a financial plan that effectively aligns with your goals, and help ease the anxiety of information-overload, tedious details, or lack of financial knowledge.

Still, finding the just-right planner can be challenging as the daily tsunami of financial news and opinion.

For instance, a web search for “financial planners Dallas” returns 64 million hits.

Where do you begin to do your due diligence for a selection process?

The Financial Planners Association®, the principle organization for CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNERS™ (CFP®) professionals, recommends five fundamental guidelines for investors who are interviewing prospective planners. Among them:

“Be sure the financial planner is sensitive to your needs and wants, and will approach your situation in a manner that makes sense for you.”

Simply put, in addition to competency, integrity and expertise, the effective financial planner holds to the core value that no two clients come to the table with the same set of resources, expectations, and short- and long-term goals.

Financial planning delivered with uncommon care

The right plan for you starts with a trusted relationship. And a trusted relationship begins with a partner who listens to and understands your cares, concerns, aspirations and goals, such as:

• Asset and investment management
• Equity and tax strategies
• Estate, college and charitable-giving planning

“It’s a personal business, managing wealth, and clients deserve to rest assured that their best interests always come first,” says Glen D. Smith, managing partner of GDS Wealth Management and a Raymond James financial planner.

Consider the interests and motivations in these two scenarios that the effective financial planner might use to develop and maintain a plan for:

• A high-level corporate executive approaching retirement with a mid-range net worth. She has attained her financial assets by being productive, saving carefully, and investing wisely. Presently, she is looking for a financial planner to help her realize her vision for the next chapter of her life.
• An entrepreneur in prime earning years with a high net-worth attained by building and selling profitable ventures. His financial needs include a strategic, straight-talking, and reliable partner whose plans produce in good markets and bad, and whom he can trust with a wide-range of financial and business needs.

“Regardless of how they came into their wealth, what they need now, or the future they envision for themselves, each and every client deserves a financial planner who puts in the time and care to earn their trust and confidence—and who will follow through on every promise,” says Smith.

Benefit from a relationship, not transactions

The Financial Planners Association® draws a bright line between transactional financial advice—the most common type of financial service—and the personal relationship that effective financial planners maintain with their clients.

“Financial planning is transformative, especially when it’s delivered by a financial planner who is committed to working in a client-centered, fiduciary-based way. That is the power of financial planning, to transform lives,” it notes.

Benefit from proactive, tailored financial services and wealth management that anticipates your needs and helps to simplify your life. Call GDS Wealth Management in Flower Mound, Texas, at 469.212.8072 to experience the positive impact of their uncommon care and attention to your best interests.