What Happens During a Financial Second Opinion?

Have you ever wondered whether your financial plan is really working as well as it could? A financial second opinion gives you the opportunity to have an experienced fiduciary review your investments, retirement strategy, tax planning, insurance, and estate planning to identify potential gaps and opportunities. Whether you already have a financial advisor or are managing everything yourself, a fresh perspective could provide valuable peace of mind.

If you would like to know whether another set of eyes could provide clarity, we’ve put together a checklist of everything you’ll want to gather before a second opinion conversation.

Download the Download the Second Opinion Preparation Checklist

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Lesley: Welcome everyone to our next webinar in our series. I’m joined by Christopher Mallon and Andrew Randisi. They’re both certified financial planners here at Pennsylvania Capital Management. Today, we’re gonna talk just briefly about what kind of information we like to gather from you.

We offer this service called a second opinion meeting, and, if you have a financial advisor right now, or if you’ve never had a financial advisor and you’re considering hiring one, these are just some of the things that we like to chat with you about on our meeting. So Chris, do you wanna take it away and I’ll bring up our sheet here?

Chris: Yeah. Go ahead and pull it up. We’ll run through it. Yeah, so I’ll give a general overview. Second opinion it’s in the name, so not totally different than getting a second opinion really on any sort of, project or professional service out there. Really what it is looking at all of your financial data that’s out there, and then just giving you a kind of, our two cents on how everything looks.

Being like, “Hey, there’s some areas of strength here. Here’s where some weakness and gaps are. Here are some areas maybe we’d address, and how we might go [00:01:00] about doing it.” A, no, no obligation looking at everything just to triple check that there’s no glaring issues, and if there are, then, could dive in more and be like, “Hey, this is areas where we would spend more time,” and then go from there And then here’s all the, here’s all the stuff that essentially we were looking at to, to really accomplish that.

And I’ll let Andrew walk through, he can read it aloud if he wants. What I… what we look at for those meetings.

Lesley: And I’ll just throw in a quick caveat before you dive into that, Andrew, too. W- it might seem intimidating, this giant list oh man, this meeting’s gonna be a pain.

I’ve got 12 things I’ve got to gather. Not all of these things apply to everybody, not everybody has RSUs, from their, the company that they work for. And really, the more data you provide us, the more beneficial the meeting will be. So if you can get us a lot of data, that’s great.

If you can only gather a couple of these things, we can work with that, too.

Andrew: And Leslie, adding to that, oftentimes it’s these checklists in particular in which we un- can uncover items that need to [00:02:00] be either built into the plan or items that are lacking in the, in… as part of the second opinion in that particular prospect’s overall financial situation.

You wouldn’t be shocked how many times we’ve had clients that are 30, even 70 years old, the very last one, “I don’t have a will.” Big glaring oversight that would need to be addressed, that gets picked up on when you’re presenting a, we’ll call it a list like this. But just some of the brief things, just brief sum- I won’t go through all of them because it’s, it sound, it looks a bit

Chris: Yeah, we’re at the heavy hitters, right?

Andrew: I’d say the heavy hitters that we want to look with to be able to really assess the client’s financial situation. We obviously first off want to look at the financial statements, which would be the account, your brokerage, whether you’re at a Schwab, a Vanguard, your 401K, or a, or 403B statements.

This is really a good opportunity for when you’re going through this to look at if there is any inactive plans. You wouldn’t be surprised, even some clients of ours that have [00:03:00] forgotten they’ve had 401K, that have changed jobs and have forgotten to roll over a 401K. It does indeed happen, folks.

Stock options and ESOPs don’t necessarily apply to everyone, but if you have, we also wanna get with, see what the debt situ- your debt situation looks like. That’ll be looking at mortgage, home equity line of credit, car loans, S- annual summaries of the credit– of the year– of the credit card.

That really more or less gives us an idea of what you are spending is those annual credit card summaries to look at, okay, what might you need in retirement to replicate your lifestyle? Or if you already are retired, what does your lifestyle look like right now? The past two years’ tax returns are always good because those are some things that we can uncover and see how the different– see how things are going in the way of you receiving your income.

And then last but not least, we wanna make sure, look on the insurance front. Not everyone might have life or disability insurance, depending upon the stage of life that you’re in, but we definitely wanna look at the property and casualty [00:04:00] to make sure that it matches with the overall assets that you have.

And then for our retired folks we also might wanna a-inquire a little bit about more whether you’re on Medicare or not, if you’re on a Medigap supplement with traditional Medicare or you’re on a Medicare Advantage plan. We can go over those things as well as part of our overall second opinion.

Chris: Yeah, I think the big takeaway from, kinda how these are successful it’s gathering all the data, then we, look at it, and then we will meet again after that and say, “Okay, yeah, here are the gaps, here are areas you might wanna address either, on your own,” or we can kinda lay out, “Hey, this is where we think we would add value.”

Or if, sometimes look at everything and be like, “Hey, everything looks pretty good. A lot of boxes are checked. Maybe think about this or this, but that’s, that’s kind of it.” And then that’ll be it. And then, no obligation, and then, no dollars out of your pocket for to get some insights into your overall financial picture.

Lesley: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it’s a service we offer. Happy to, anyone out there that wants to just have a chat with us and see what it’s like to have a financial advisor if you don’t have one or [00:05:00] if you have one and you’re just thinking maybe you’d like to make a switch, we’re happy to have this conversation and get a little information from you, share some insights that we see.

And then, yeah, it’s up to you to decide how you wanna move forward from there. So thank you everybody for joining us. Feel free to reach out if you’d like to chat with us. And you can reach us on our website, pcmadvisors.com. Thanks everybody. Have a good day.