Philosophy

We don’t sell financial products. Period. Full Stop. So, you know that the financial advice we give is genuinely best suited for your needs. Independent and unbiased financial advice is critical when making short-term or long-term financial plans. This is the beauty of the fee-for service or advice-only planning model!

We are realistic about financial plans. It’s important for you to have a sustainable plan that makes sense given your unique situation. We want to push you to be your best financial self, but we are also aware that life happens and things can change. Let us help! Together, we can create a customized, realistic plan that will help you sleep at night knowing you’re on the right path.

The old school (or customary) financial planning model is to perform a comprehensive (and expensive) retirement financial plan and provide a 10-30 page printed document with beautiful graphs. This document usually ends up in the sitting in a filing cabinet collecting dust. Plans don’t get implemented like this!

While these comprehensive plans can be great for over-arching financial goals and objectives, a person’s financial situation will change… a lot over their lifetime, rendering this large and expensive document useless.

We believe that financial planning is all about the short-term action items. During our sessions we follow a systematic discovery process to assess your current financial situation, your goals and constraints in order map out the long-term goals. However, we use customizable tools (that you get to keep) and easy to implement action items that will move you towards those larger goals in the short run.

Analogy

We like to think of your financial life as a road trip. Let’s think of retirement as the final destination of a road trip across Canada; St. John’s Newfoundland (you now) to Victoria BC (happily retired). Maybe Ontario is where you buy a home (if you’re into that) and Saskatchewan is when you have babies (if you’re into that). The typical comprehensive plan will look at the map of Canada and draw the most efficient route from Newfoundland to Victoria. But THAT’S IT! What if you get a flat tire in New Brunswick? (aka lose your job) or can’t wait to take a detour in Alberta (starting your own business).

Our advice-only financial planning model looks at the big map first to draw out the rough itinerary, but then maps out what to do in each province and how many kilometers you should be averaging a day to ensure you get to Victoria by your desired time. Since meetings are affordable, we can check in with your progress at every checkpoint to map out the next section of road and ensure that the overall route still makes sense – maybe you want shift directions and head for Mexico! Regardless…. you’ll get to where you want to go and you’ll get the action items to get you there.