Tax & Planning Expertise
Virtually all investment, retirement, financial planning, and legacy questions involve important tax implications, and planning strategies often involve trade-offs. The tax laws surrounding retirement plans, required minimum distributions, and estates and trusts are beyond complicated. Envision’s advisors have decades of expertise, placing them among the select few CPA’s and attorneys that truly understand the intricacies of these laws, high-level planning strategies, and resulting trade-offs.
Retirement planning also involves decisions about the timing of certain events (e.g. Social Security commencement, IRA distributions, stock option exercises, payment of deferred compensation, harvesting gains or losses on stocks, etc.). Envision’s advisors are uniquely equipped to prepare multi-year tax projections to analyze the marginal tax rate implications and trade-offs of various strategies, providing clients with valuable context to make informed decisions
Envision’s Proprietary Monte Carlo Model
Candidly, many advisors drop the ball when it comes to analyzing retirement capital sufficiency and recommending asset allocation mixes. Many rely on risk tolerance questionnaires and rules-of-thumb based on age to recommend asset allocation, while some use Monte Carlo modeling software to project retirement cash flows. Conventional Monte Carlo tools generate voluminous reports with fancy charts, but we’ve found that the inputs and methodologies are questionable to say the least. Many Monte Carlo tools use unrealistic rates of return and fail to consider investment expenses. Many fail to recognize that, as investors age, stocks may become less suitable over time. Monte Carlo tools that fail to adjust asset allocation over time likely project unrealistic future investment growth rates.
Envision has built a proprietary Monte Carlo modeling tool that adjusts clients’ asset allocations over time, reflecting the likelihood of declining risk tolerance with age. Rather than simply relying on historical investment returns, Envision utilizes conservative return assumptions based on long-term forward-looking forecasts and includes estimated investment expenses to provide realistic context for a range of possible retirement outcomes.