The Importance of Integrating Financial and Tax Planning

Tax and financial planning work in unison. Effective strategies will help optimize your after-tax capital and ensure you do everything possible to achieve your financial goals.

Why Does Financial Planning and Tax Planning Work So Well Together?

Investing is a good way to ensure you can maintain your lifestyle through retirement, pay for your children’s college, and even build a multi-generational legacy.

There are many ways to start planning for your future. Some investors try to save more or delay their goals, so the market has time to grow. These options don’t always sound desirable, even if they are feasible.

Another option is to become more tax efficient. In other words, to reduce the tax taken from your investment earnings.

Taxes are a substantial drag on wealth accumulation because they hamper the powerful effects of compound growth rates. That’s because investors will never earn additional investment returns on the dollars paid out as taxes. So even small reductions in taxes can have a big impact on wealth accumulation over time.

These Reductions Can Be Made Through Things Like:

Securities and account types that are tax exempt

Structures and strategies that defer taxes to a later date

The combined effects of tax exemption and tax deferral, as these securities and account types can work together to have a complementary impact.

Lowering taxes now, even by a little bit, can have a big impact on wealth accumulation over time.

A Business Plan for Life

Having a plan with the flexibility to deal with changes and life issues is critical. This is the cornerstone of our planning philosophy; we call it a Business Plan for Life. The strategy is based on cash flow and tax impact rather than insurance and investments and can effectively deal with multiple “what if” scenarios.

A Financial Plan Should:

Integrate and coordinate all forms of planning.

Be based on cash flow and tax, not insurance and investments, provides a realistic assessment of the plan's viability for that person's current and future situation.

Provide multiple "what if" scenarios for now and down the road to prepare for all of life's "consistent inconsistencies".

Endeavor to quantify freedoms – the sole focus should not be on saving as much as you can but on determining the specific liberties you can take, allowing you to enjoy what you have sacrificed and worked so hard for.

The Business Plan for Life is exactly that: It regards your estate (everything you own) as a business and manages it with the same hands-on scrutiny it takes to run it successfully.

Tax Planning

Investment Positioning

Cash Flow Management

Estate Preservation

RESULT: Creating a much more serious awareness of the importance of addressing all areas of planning and the impact each has on the others.

This program has been developed in partnership with Chris Wilmerding of Thayer Partners LLC

Chris began his career at Lazard Frères & Co. in New York City as an investment banking analyst working on major, national and international mergers and acquisitions. After graduate school, he joined the turn-around team of a specialty packaging business, co-founded the Intuit Developer Network and was a General Partner of a Boston private equity firm. Prior to founding Thayer Partners, Chris was a Senior Portfolio Manager at UBS in Boston, specializing in corporate retirement plans and individual retirement planning.

Chris graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, Magna Cum Laude, was in an accelerated doctoral program and studied Modern European History at Oxford. He is an Accredited Investment Fiduciary® and graduated from the Wealth Advisor Program at UBS. He lives in Wyndmoor, PA with his wife and two children and serves on his church’s vestry, as well as on several business and charitable boards and committees.