Services
Whether transitioning due to death, retirement, widowhood, divorce,or anything else, we arehere to provide tax services and financial planning that is customized for optimal results.
My services include the following life transition scenarios:
Financial Organization
Is your house cluttered with de-cluttering books? Like many of us, your best efforts to organize your financial life may have gone astray as a result of a life transition. Smart Transition Strategies™ is here to help you efficiently channel your energy towards financial empowerment!
Life can be "messy" unless you take some time to get your financial ducks in a row! With financial organization in place, you will be ready for your next life phase and will have optimized the potential for the new energy that you (and the universe) can bring to it!
Here is a quick checklist of ways to help you get organized:
- Build a complex system for gathering and sorting your documents into categories for better comprehension.
- Organize your documents in physical manila folders, three-ring loose leaf binders, a rolling briefcase, or portable file banker’s boxes.
- Summarize your current insurance and estate planning.
- Identify and store your wills, including living wills.
- Build a storage vault (both digitally and on paper) for documenting and communicating essential financial information such as passwords and other account credentials.
- Online strategy for storing digital documents securely in the cloud, and keeping printed backups of essential documents in secure places.
Smart Transition Strategies™ will organize and guide you via financial empowerment, whether you are single, married, widowed or divorced. Together we will develop personalized solutions and work side-by-side to implement personal financial plans.
Widowhood
Weathering Widowhood and Life Transitions
To transition gracefully from one life phase to the next, Smart Transition Strategies™ helps clients construct a history of their financial life, as well as to provide guidance for navigating the waters going forward. Whether contemplating a transition or thrust into one against your will, the experience is always highly challenging.
Here are some steps we recommend:
- Safely store your documents.
- Create, fund, and protect an emergency account.
- Get expert advice about your needs and empowerment.
- Execute recommendations to establish separate credit.
- Be educated in family finances and empowered to make educated financial choices in the event of illness, death, or life transition such as contemplation of retirement.
Financial education assists both of us in reducing the unknowns. We utilize Smart Transition Strategies™ to inform clients of available tools to get organized, work with a personal financial planner, set goals, evaluate cash flow, manage risk, control debt, invest wisely, reduce taxes, estate planning, and refer you to well qualified professionals where necessary.
If the transition is sudden, the journey may include identification of assets, liabilities and accounts. Once the history of your financial life is organized, we can move on to the personal financial planning process.
During this process, be sure to maintain your calendar of appointments. Perhaps you are considering selling, buying, leasing, or making other life changes that necessitate engaging a professional. Remember to keep all passwords in a secure location. Change your passwords periodically.
After gathering Overcoming Divorce and Changes of Course
Divorce requires a team effort. It calls for a coordinated approach, working in tandem with legal, financial planning and accounting disciplines. But even with teamwork, we remain as your strategic advisor before, during and after filing for divorce. We are here for you even after the divorce decree is complete.
Smart Transition Strategies™ analyzes and furnishes you with a personal financial plan before discussing options. The process is designed to empower you to make the necessary choices to move forward as soon as possible on your journey into the next chapter of your life.
Contact Smart Transition Strategies to meet one-on-one for your initial free consultation.
Divorce
Overcoming Divorce and Changes of Course
Divorce must be handled as a team effort — by its very nature, a divorce requires a coordinated approach, working hand-in-hand with legal, financial planning and accounting disciplines. In addition to working with a team, we remain as your strategic advisor before filing for divorce, after you have filed for divorce and even after the divorce decree is complete.
The CDFA Professional — Why seek out a Certified Divorce Financial Analyst?
To minimize legal and other professional fees, many couples look outside the legal system for help with a divorce. As such, it is highly advisable to engage the services of a Certified Divorce Financial Analyst (CDFA) to help in preserving the family’s finances.
The value of CDFA credential and designation:
- CDFA professionals and matrimonial lawyers can work in tandem to assist the client and the attorney with personalized graphs and reports to support your case.
- Engaging a CDFA professional provides short-term financial impact, long-term tax opportunities, and serves your financial needs for decades to come.
- When the divorce financial analyst begins the process, the participation of the financial specialist benefits both the client and the lawyers.
- The CDFA wades through the financial documents of a divorce case to help in budgeting and taxanalysis.
- The CDFA is who clients can turn to before or at time of settlement and offers insight into the various pros and cons of different settlement proposals.
- The CDFA is on alert for tax snafus, can educate clients on insurance issues after a split, and demystify stock options and investments.
- Tax and financial issues are addressed in marital dissolutions in both Mediation and the Collaborative Process as an alternative to litigation.
The Institute for Divorce Financial Analysts grants certification and designation once professionals such as CPAs, attorneys, mediators and financial planners successfully complete the IDFA’s exam in several modules and numerous case studies, which include:
- Advanced Financial Issues of Divorce
- Legal Issues of Divorce
- Tax Issues of Divorce
The CDFA helps clients with financial issues that includes:
- Personal property vs. marital property
- Valuing and dividing property such as splitting marital home
- Retirement assets and pensions
- Spousal support and child support
- Financial and tax solutions in transition