Beyond Investment Management: What a Financial Advisor Really Does

Most people think financial advisors primarily manage investments, but comprehensive financial planning goes far beyond portfolio management. In this discussion, the team at Pennsylvania Capital Management explains how cash flow planning, tax strategies, insurance reviews, retirement planning, and estate planning work together to help clients make informed financial decisions and pursue their long-term goals.

These are the areas that can have a lasting impact on your financial future—yet they’re often overlooked. That’s why we’ve created a simple overview of the key planning areas we review with clients.

Download the PCM Pillars of Service Guide

Lesley: [00:00:00] Welcome everyone I’m joined by Christopher Mallon and Andrew Randisi. They’re both certified financial planners here at Pennsylvania Capital Management. Today, we’re going to be talking about what we offer to our clients the services that we provide, and the different things that we will help you with in your financial journey.

I’ll share a document that we have that we send to clients, but Chris, do you want to take it away and get-

Chris: Yeah …

Lesley: us started on this topic?

Chris: Yeah, so I’d say this is a document we’ll work off of to answer the question what am I paying for, right? What do you guys do? So we try and, have it, stacked here in these various different things being, the investment management is going to be the, I’d say the nuts and bolts, right?

Any, financial services firm you talk to, investment management’s going to be in the, in, in the wheelhouse. That’s kinda like base case scenario. And then on top of that, different, different firms have different places of emphasis or expertise and then, different levels of planning they’ll dive into, and we try and hit the, all the big ones with cash flow [00:01:00] planning, tax planning, insurance planning, estate planning.

Really trying to check all those boxes because to kinda isolate each one individually, you’re probably leaving the other areas lacking. And then a lot of these have influence on each other, right? Cash flow planning is going to have a significant impact on what the investment management picture looks like.

The investment management’s going to have a, pretty big picture on what tax planning and insurance planning might look like. So all these things interact with each other, and I think it’d be pretty hard to do this job well without having a firm understanding of each of these. I’m rambling here a bit, but I’ll kick over to Andrew if he wants to go through some details about what we do in almost, every client case here.

Andrew: Yeah, so except the way I also like to look at these are our financial planning pillars or tenants. So this is what we’re covering or at least talking about with clients, maybe one or two or all of these topics on a daily basis. It’s not just and this is where the value add is, putting together a portfolio is one part of it, but knowing the rest of the [00:02:00] how and the why.

How does building a portfolio come into play when it comes in terms of retirement planning and being able to withdraw on the portfolio, and what’s the sequence? That would come into cash flow planning. Managing the taxes of those portfolios with, of those portfolio draws, what buckets do we pull from?

A joint brokerage after-tax brokerage account, a pre-tax IRA, a Roth IRA, a trust account. That’s where a lot of it will go in the tax, on the tax planning front. Insurance. What is the client’s insurance? Do the amount of liabilities that the client has match the existing life insurance need?

Or if there’s a health insurance, whether it be for while you’re actively working or in retirement and it’s transitioning to Medicare after 65, how does that work? Do you have the right parts? Do you have all your coverages? And then the most last important tenet and pillar that we often discuss with clients would be that estate planning.

Now that you’ve built this nest egg, [00:03:00] how do you want to design the framework essentially for passing it down to other loved ones in your family? Is everything coordinated and titled in the right proper beneficiary designation or outlined in your will? And then really, what gifting do you want to do now and experiences that you want to have with your family while you can do it?

Chris: Yeah. And I think it’s important, too, it’s at least how we operate it’s not… I’d say it’s not a la carte, just pick and choose, “Oh, I just want to do tax planning but ignore the rest.” It’s, we do it all. It’s easier for us to say yes to more projects than no, maybe to our detriment, but there’s very few, any financially tangentially related thing out there we will pretty much say yes to as long as it has some sort of impact on, our client’s financial picture.

We like to, be involved and help any way we can especially on the front end, right? That’s the, you plan beforehand and then can adjust and tweak things as things go. It’s easier to do that than to look at something and be like, “Hey, I did this. What do you think?” And then [00:04:00] trying to, unwind different things.

So yeah, the planning is important, at least to have a, a starting point

Lesley: Sounds good. Thank you both very much. That’s just a brief overview on the services that we offer here at Pennsylvania Capital Management. If you’d like to schedule an introductory call to, to meet the team and hear a little bit more in detail about what we offer, please go to our website pcmadvisors.com.

You can schedule a call there. You’re welcome to email Chris or Andrew. You can call us at 215-881-7700. Just reach out, and we’d be happy to schedule a meeting. Thanks for joining us today.