Paul Sydlansky, CFP®, guides you through aligning your investments with personal goals. Learn what kinds of accounts you should use for different goals, like emergency funds, your children’s futures, retirement, and more.
Topics Discussed:
- Goal 1: Emergency Fund
- Goal 2: Children’s Future
- Goal 3: Retirement or Financial Independence
- Goal 4: Second Home
Transcript:
Hi, everybody. It’s Paul Sydlansky, and welcome to episode seven of The Build, our 24-part planning series, where we walk you through what it’s like to build a plan with Lake Road Advisors from start to finish. In today’s episode, we’re going to talk about aligning your investments with your goals.
Last time, we helped you understand your balance sheet and really get ahold of your assets. Now’s the time to take those goals that we’ve developed and assign every asset on your balance sheet to a specific goal. Today, I’m just going to talk about four specific goals that are really common for all of our clients and one of the appropriate accounts to tie those goals to.
Let’s start out with one of the most important goals for everybody: safety and security. And that’s an emergency account. For most of our clients, the number one type of risk for them is job loss. In order to be prepared for that job loss, we believe in setting up an emergency account for three to six months of expenses. Holding that money in cash is the best way to protect yourself in case the unexpected happens.
The second goal that most of our clients have involves their children, whether that’s setting them up for college or setting up for the future and starting a career or business. For those types of accounts, those are going to be the 529s, the UGMAs, the UTMAs, or even an after-tax brokerage account. We want to make sure on your balance sheet any assets that are specifically for your kids are going to be in these types of accounts and that they’re aligned with whatever the goal is that you have for your kids.
The third type of goal that we often see is retirement or really financial independence. For those accounts, you’re going to have your 401(k)s, your 403(b)s, your IRAs, and your Roth IRAs. We want to make sure that those accounts are all pointed toward the retirement or independence goal and invested appropriately. And we’ll talk next time about how we actually do the investing and how we develop a tactical strategy on what to invest in.
The fourth type of goal that our clients tend to have is something like a vacation home or a second home or that type of goal. We’re going to look at either a cash account or an after-tax brokerage account, really depending upon how far out that goal is.
Those are just four typical goals that we see our clients have. And like I said, one of the first parts of really developing an overall strategy is to look at your balance sheet, look at your assets, and make sure each one of your assets has a role and is pointed toward the goal.
In our next episode, we’ll talk about how we develop a specific investment strategy for each one of those goals. We look forward to seeing you on the next episode.
Lake Road Advisors, a Fee-Only, independent financial planning firm with offices in Corning, NY, Ithaca, NY and Portland, OR works with clients virtually all across the country. Paul Sydlansky, the founder of Lake Road Advisors LLC, has worked in the financial services industry for 20+ years. Prior to founding Lake Road Advisors, Paul worked at Morgan Stanley in Manhattan for 13 years. While at Morgan Stanley, Paul was a senior-level manager within the Institutional Equities Department. In 2018 he was named to Investopedia’s Top 100 Financial Advisors list. Paul received a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from Marist College and holds an MBA from New York University Leonard N. Stern School of Business. Paul is a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ and a member of the National Association of Personal Financial Advisors (NAPFA) and the XY Planning Network.
The information provided is for educational and informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice and it should not be relied on as such. It should not be considered a solicitation to buy or an offer to sell a security. It does not take into account any investor’s particular investment objectives, strategies, tax status or investment horizon. You should consult your attorney or tax advisor.
