What is Personal Financial Planning for Everyone™?

Summary – Personal Financial Planning for Everyone™ (PFPE)

• Financial advisors typically require a minimum and substantial amount of money to invest before they will offer their services to a potential client. If you don’t have enough money, you generally can’t access good advice to help you get started toward your goals.
  
• Articles and online resources often don’t provide adequate help, in part because there is simply too much information to weed through, but also because the information may be too generalized to fit your particular situation. And what if you have questions?
  
• Fully one-quarter of households in the U.S. don’t even have access to basic banking services, like checking accounts, credit cards, and auto or home loans, let alone financial planning services. Low-income people of color have even less chance of accessing to financial services, due to systemic discrimination in the financial industry.
  
• Eagleson Arndt is committed to providing essential financial planning and advice for everyone who has the means and commitment to make progress toward that goals – that means for our high-net-worth clients, as well as members of our community who are just starting or restarting their journey to better financial health.
  
• We are Registered Financial Advisors (RIAs), which means we are held to a higher legal and ethical standard to act in your best interest. We don’t earn commissions or take incentives to sell financial products. We sell advice and we are dedicated to your long-term success.
  
• We offer financial planning services like traditional asset management, as well as hourly advice with no long-term commitment, regardless of whether you have money to invest. All of our services are tailored to you and provided personally by our dedicated team.
  
• We are just announcing our new platform, Personal Financial Planning for Everyone™ (PFPE), to help our clients who are just starting out to get a jump on reaching their specific financial goals.
  
• Personal Financial Planning for Everyone™ combines secure, easy-to-use financial planning technology with a customized financial plan developed specifically for you, and quarterly phone or video meetings with your EAFA financial advisor to set and evaluate progress toward your financial goals.

Who doesn’t have access to financial planning?

Long before Covid-19, Eagleson Arndt Financial Advisors had a great concern that access to truly personal financial planning was accessible only to people with significant assets. Financial advisors often require a minimum asset account for entry into the world of good advice. Over time, we realized this left out a whole lot of people; not just young people, but those who got a late start or who had gone through a life transition such as a job loss or divorce.

Compounding the problem, proliferation of online “advice” draws us into endless searches for answers. Google “top 5 investing tips” and you’ll get (literally) 246 million results. Articles on money management may pique your interest, but tend not to provide answers you can take action on – because they’re not customized to you.

We’ve also discovered that the opinions of “personality” advisors can actually derail some people from moving forward. For example, one well-known rule of thumb is that you must have six months’ worth of expenses saved (or more) in your emergency fund before you think about investing. What if you’re not able save that much right now – or maybe ever? Does that mean you should shelve any hope reaching your financial goals?

The reality is, access to financial planning (and to financial services more generally) tends to have a strong relationship to income, class, and race. According to a 2018 paper published by the U.S. Partnership on Mobility from Poverty, about one in four U.S. households are either unbanked or underbanked.[1] In other words, a quarter of households are unable to obtain basic banking services like a bank account, credit cards, or loans for cars or homes. The Federal Reserve’s 2017 Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking determined that only 80% of black and Hispanic households earning less than $40,000 a year (qualifying as low income) have access to a bank account – about 10% less than their counterparts from low-income white households.[2]

In addition to basic banking services, there is tremendous need for financial planning services for non-high-net-worth individuals and families. Since most Registered Investment Advisors (RIAs) and financial planners charge a fee based on assets managed, the industry is motivated to work with people who have higher assets – and to ignore people who perceivably don’t have enough money to invest.

Profitability in any business is important to long-term sustainability and growth, but we believe there is a method to achieving business goals while serving a larger client base at a more reasonable price.

So what is Personal Financial Planning for Everyone™?

Generally speaking, it’s our philosophy at Eagleson Arndt. We’ve never met anyone who didn’t want to have a brighter and more abundant financial future. And we are committed to providing tailored financial planning services to anyone with the means and commitment to making progress toward their goals. For these reasons, Eagleson Arndt offers several ways to work with us – so that you we can serve you through everything from transitions in your life to shifts in the market.

We offer traditional asset management, investment advising, retirement planning, and 401k plan management – with a twist. Since there are no cookie-cutter clients, we don’t offer cookie-cutter asset management. We recognize that every person and small business is unique with different circumstances, needs, experiences and expectations, so we do our best to guide you toward your dreams and goals. We get to know each client’s financial goals, risk tolerance, and values, and help you manage your funds in ways that align with each of these factors. In addition, we uniquely offer hourly financial planning services, giving you access to expert financial planning services that are tailored to your current needs, goals, and circumstances, whether or not you have a dime to invest.

We are excited to announce that Personal Financial Planning for Everyone™ (PFPE) is also a new product offering from EAFA. We have created an affordable, robust platform where we can effectively offer personal financial advice, tailored directly to you. PFPE is a subscription-based app developed exclusively for our clients who are starting – or restarting – their work toward financial security. The platform gives you access to our financial planning technology, a customized financial plan, email and phone support, and quarterly phone or video conference meetings with your dedicated Eagleson Arndt financial advisor to set goals and evaluate your progress.

Personal Financial Planning for Everyone™ combines secure, easy-to-use financial planning technology with a customized financial plan developed specifically for you, and quarterly phone or video meetings with your EAFA financial advisor to set and evaluate progress toward your financial goals.

For more than 20 years, we’ve offered quality advice to our clients and experienced the absolute joy of watching them achieve their goals. There is nothing more exciting to us than being able to say, “Yes! You can retire comfortably,” or “Yes! You have sufficient funds to send your kids to college.”

How do financial advisors make money?

The financial services world is complex. Not all financial advisors are the same. Many sell products and are licensed by their firms to give quasi-advice based upon the ultimate goal of a selling a specific product that they want you to buy. We have nothing to sell except personal advice. While our primary business is managing wealth assets, we earn no commissions for our work, nor do we receive any incentives from financial product companies. We are a Registered Investment Advisor, which means we are held to a higher standard as fiduciaries. A fiduciary is an expert who holds a legal and ethical relationship with clients. This standard guides all our decision-making in the best interest of our clients. Our job is to provide a space to discuss your dreams and goals and a plan to help you achieve them.

We are financial advisors – not financial deciders

Our clients are regular people: moms and dads, grandmas and grandpas, young adults and graduates, single parents, individuals, couples, and small business owners – as diverse as Marvel’s Defenders. As we develop personal relationships with our clients, we have long been committed to helping them become better “financial” consumers. We assist them with wading through the overwhelming amount of information and advice available at their fingertips 24/7 and help them achieve financial peace of mind as they live their lives with all its ups and downs. Our process is dynamic. Our planning can and will change depending on what’s happening in your life. We feel it’s important to be partners with and not directors of our clients’ financial futures. Education is a big part of what we do because we want you to feel empowered to move forward with confidence toward your dream of financial freedom.

How has your situation changed? What goals can we help you reach toward? Call us at 805.496.8450 or email us and let’s get started.

[1] Bynum, William J, Elliott, Diana, Sivak, Edward. US partnership on Mobility from Poverty. “Opening Mobility Pathways by Closing the Financial Services Gap.” Feb 2018. https://www.mobilitypartnership.org/opening-mobility-pathways-closing-financial-services-gap. Accessed 6/17/2020.

[2] Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. “Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2017.” May 2018. https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/2017-report-economic-well-being-us-households-201805.pdf. Accessed 6/17/2020.

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