Fee-Based Financial Planning

When you want a financial plan developed with your goals and interests put above all else, it’s a good time to engage a fee-based financial planner.

Fee-based financial planners design unique personal financial plans and are compensated for their time and expertise. Under this fee structure, the planner is a fiduciary and has a legal and moral responsibility to place your interests first.

Of course, your planner’s role goes beyond just providing expert guidance in the creation of your financial plan. A fee-based planner can also help you with the implementation of your plan through a combination of appropriate and innovative insurance, brokerage, advisory and/or private client platform solutions.

In the end, your planner is paid to work with you to make sure your financial needs are met with care, with expertise and with an understanding of your unique circumstances and individual goals. Together, you will agree on the appropriate fee structure based upon those needs and the specific services required.

Making great decisions about your wealth, whether you are deciding to grow it, protect it or both, starts with sound thinking – thinking that makes sense. Here’s how our thinking starts when it comes to helping you make important financial decisions.

The Planning Process

With financial independence, family legacy and social capital solutions in place, wealth optimization becomes the focus of the planning process. Your planner will use a unique and disciplined values-based approach to help you make wise choices and to help ensure that your plan is focusing on what you value.

The planning process consists of four quadrants or phases, each one representing one planning cycle: Discovery, Creative Solutions, Strategy Deployment, and Results Management.

1. Discovery: Identify and think about the problem. The first phase begins by thinking clearly about the problem. This is called the Discovery phase, and this is where clarity on your goals is achieved and planning gaps are identified.
2. Creative Solutions: Think about the solution. The second phase is the Creative Solutions phase, in which you think clearly about the solutions and make decisions regarding closing the planning gaps.
3. Strategy Deployment: Implement the solution. The third phase is the Strategy Deployment phase, in which you implement the solution that helps you achieve your desired results.
4. Results Management: Manage the results. The final phase is the Results Management phase; we establish a plan to manage and implement the results. This assures that you have confidence your plan will work over time.

Working with a knowledgeable and experienced planner who has access to current technologies and a thorough understanding of tax rules and financial planning techniques is important. Working with an advisor who takes the time to understand your unique desires and goals is critical.

Your planner will take the time to help you make that assessment, develop a plan that works for you and provide you with the tools and strategies necessary to successfully implement that plan.

Financial Planning

Every event in life brings unique opportunities. We can help you be financially prepared to take advantage of them.

When you work with our team to develop a financial planning roadmap, we’ll apply time-tested strategies, providing expert advice and making recommendations based on where you are today and where you want to be in the future.

And along the way, you’ll have the knowledge and insight to make financial decisions that are right for you and your loved ones, so you can meet each of life’s milestones with confidence.

• Create a Budget
  To reach any financial goal, you need to understand how much is coming in and how much is going out each month by establishing and spending within a budget.

• Getting Your First Job
  Now that you have your first job, you no doubt have big dreams and lofty goals. You need to ensure you can achieve them. By taking the first step now, you’ll be setting yourself up for a lifetime of financial security.

• Getting Married
  If you’re about to be married or are newly married, you probably have big hopes and dreams for your future together. Make sure you’re financially prepared – as a couple – to make your dreams a reality.

• Buying a New Home
  Buying a new home can be one of life’s most gratifying accomplishments. As you prepare to take that big step, make sure you’re ready for the financial commitment. When you approach your decision with confidence, you’ll be free to enjoy this exciting time in your life.

• Welcoming a Child or Grandchild
  Now more than ever, your goal is to protect the financial well-being of your family. As you welcome a new child or grandchild, evaluate your financial plan to ensure it’s designed to meet changing priorities as your family grows.

• Funding a Child’s Education
  If one of your financial goals is to pay for a child’s education, the earlier you create a college savings plan, the better. Not only will you save more, you’ll have more time to ride the ups and downs of the financial markets if you choose to invest your savings.

• Changing Jobs
  If you’re thinking about changing jobs – or are plunging into self-employment – make sure you are financially prepared to transition smoothly. A new position can be an exciting opportunity, but it may also add to the financial demands on you and your family.

• Losing a Job
  Losing a job can take a toll on your ego. But it doesn’t have to take a toll on your financial security. There are steps you can take to lessen the impact of temporary unemployment and protect the financial well-being of yourself and your loved ones.

• Living Comfortably in Retirement
  Now more than ever, planning for your retirement is critical. At Northwestern Mutual, our approach to retirement planning is designed to help you get to – and through – retirement with a greater level of financial confidence, so you can relax knowing you have a road map to achieve your goals.

• Building Wealth
  At Northwestern Mutual, our financial planning process and investment advisory services are designed to help you zero in on what’s most important to you, prioritize your goals and develop strategies to bring your vision for the future to life.

• Accident or Illness
  An accident or illness can change your life in an instant. Of course, most people don’t like to think about the potential ramifications of a disabling disease or traumatic event, but these incidents happen more often than you might think. That’s why protecting your ability to earn an income is important.

• Divorce
  Divorce can be disruptive to you and your family. Eliminate some of the stress of reinventing your life by taking control of your financial planning.

• Loss of a Loved One
  Of all the challenges in life, the loss of a loved one can be one of the most painful experiences you will encounter. By having a financial plan in place to manage the financial consequences of losing a loved one, you can focus on addressing the emotional challenges death may bring.

• Estate Planning
  When you have an estate plan in place, your children or other loved ones won’t be burdened with making tough decisions on your behalf when they’re already dealing with your illness or death.

At the outset, your financial plan may not need to address all of these life events. But over time, as your circumstances and priorities change, we’ll work with you to adjust your plan accordingly.

Risk Management Solutions

When your financial plan includes wealth protection and risk management, you'll be helping to ensure your family — and your vision for the future — is secure.

We'll work with you to develop strategies to:

• Provide for your family in the event of death.

  Life insurance policies can be designed with different needs in mind. They can provide temporary protection, cash accumulation or may be utilized as part of an estate plan. Through our association with Northwestern Mutual, we have access to Northwestern Mutual's high-quality, competitively priced life insurance products, including permanent, term, combination and variable policies.

• Provide for you and your family in the event of a disability.

  Disability income insurance helps to protect your most valuable asset, your ability to earn an income. But what if the unexpected happened and you suddenly weren’t able to earn a living because of illness or injury? Not only would you have the stress of meeting everyday living expenses, but you might also have to put other goals, like saving for a child's college or for retirement, on hold.

• Provide for long-term care.

  Long-term Care events can have a significant impact on your financial security. Planning for long-term care events can help provide options on how to fund and receive care, should you need it.

Life Insurance Planning

You work hard to give your loved ones every advantage. But would your family have the financial resources to maintain its lifestyle if you died?

While nothing can replace you, a life insurance policy can help ensure that your loved ones have the financial security necessary to live out their dreams. Life insurance benefits can help:

• Pay the mortgage or any other debt.
• Maintain your family’s standard of living.
• Keep your children in their current school and fund college.
• Pay for final expenses.
• Leave a legacy.

Life insurance can also be more than a safety net. Depending on the type of life insurance, it can also be the foundation for a sound financial strategy. With permanent life insurance, for example, as you pay premiums, the policy accumulates cash value that grows tax deferred and can become a source of funding you can utilize to help meet your financial goals.*

That’s in contrast to term life insurance, which does not build cash value but is one of the more affordable types of insurance you can buy.

If you’re a business owner, offering life insurance as part of a comprehensive benefits package will help to recruit and retain valuable employees and give them the financial security they need while contributing to the success of your business.

Life insurance can also minimize the financial impact felt by the death of a key contributor to your business. Its proceeds or cash value can be used to cover the potential loss of business or recruit a successor.

*Utilizing cash value through policy loans, surrenders, or cash withdrawals will reduce the death benefit; and may necessitate greater outlay than anticipated and/or result in an unexpected taxable event.

Education Funding

If one of your financial goals is to pay for a child’s education, the earlier you establish a college savings plan, the better. A personalized education funding plan will not only help you save more, it will also give you more time to ride the ups and downs of the financial markets if you choose to invest your savings.

Two of the most common college funding vehicles are 529 Plans and Coverdell Education Savings Accounts, though there are many ways to save for a child’s education.

And although your wish may be to fully fund your child’s education, don’t allow that goal to put your own retirement at risk. It’s much like the instructions you’re given by flight attendants when you travel by air: In case of emergency, put your oxygen mask on first before putting it on your child. If you don’t take care of funding your own retirement, you may end up weighing down your kids with that responsibility later in life. Children have options for funding their education, such as loans and scholarships. Retirees don’t.

Working together on your education funding strategies, we can help you better understand your options to meet all of your financial goals.

Retirement Planning

Now more than ever, retirement planning is critical. Gone are the days when pensions and Social Security provided all of the income you needed for retirement. The new reality is that you are responsible for managing your own retirement, and that starts with making sure you're strategic in your planning.

We can help. At Northwestern Mutual, our approach to retirement planning is designed to help you get to—and through—retirement with a greater level of financial confidence, so you can relax knowing you have a road map to achieve your goals.

You'll want to start by considering how much to save for retirement and where to save it. By accumulating as much as you can as soon as you can, you can put time on your side—time to plan, time to weather the ups and downs of the market and time to let your money grow.

And then, as you zero in on retirement, you'll need a different set of strategies to manage risk and make your money last through retirement.

Investment Strategies

Your goal to achieve financial security will undoubtedly include investing for your future.

We can offer you the expertise you need to ensure your investment strategies are aligned with your goals, time horizon and tolerance for risk.

Northwestern Mutual offers investment advisory services, private client services and trust services. Within these levels of service, we may recommend that your portfolio include one or more of the following investment tools.

• Signature Choice is an investment advisory program that allows your wealth management advisor to provide advice concerning asset allocation, security selection and rebalancing. Your advisor can utilize a wide range of securities including mutual funds, exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and individual equity and fixed income investments to help implement your investment strategy.

• Signature Managed Accounts is an investment advisory program that utilizes third party asset management and portfolio manager selection to assist in providing you with a comprehensive investment solution.

• Signature Portfolios is an investment advisory program that utilizes select mutual funds and/or exchange traded funds to construct well-diversified portfolios for your needs.

• Signature Annuities is an investment advisory solution that utilizes investment options available within the NM Select^TM Variable Annuity to construct, comprehensive, well-diversified investment portfolios for your needs.

We also have access to offer you the following products and services through Northwestern Mutual Investment Services, LLC (NMIS):

• Bonds
• Cash management services
• CDs
• Money market funds
• Mutual funds
• Stocks
• Treasury bills
• UITs

Wealth Management

Our wealth management services go above and beyond what you might expect from a financial services provider. Northwestern Mutual Wealth Management Company offers:

Investment advisory services, designed to:

• Provide high-quality investment services and products.
• Build and monitor diversified portfolios.
• Develop objective, personalized plans.
• Focus on long-term results.

Trust services and partnerships, designed to:

• Provide continuity of stewardship that can last multiple generations.
• Preserve family harmony when carrying out your intentions.
• Carry out detailed record-keeping and accounting.
• Calculate taxes and file returns.

Northwestern Mutual Wealth Management Company serves as trustee on Irrevocable Life Insurance Trusts. In addition, through our Trust Alliance Program, we partner with nationally-recognized trust administration firms that offer a broad range of services to revocable trusts, charitable trusts, endowments and foundations.

Online access to your account, so you can review:

• Comprehensive monthly statements.
• Performance reporting.
• Account access on a secure website.
• Current account balances on your investment holdings.
• Detailed transaction records on all accounts.

Qualified Planning

• Qualified Benchmarking

  Understanding how your retirement plan compares to industry benchmarks for expenses, performance and design is not only a good business practice, it is becoming a regulatory expectation. Based on our experience and industry resources, we will provide you with comparative data to document a sound due diligence process.

• Qualified Design Assistance

  Sponsoring a qualified plan is a critically important step toward achieving retirement security for you and your employees. Choosing the right plan design elements will allow you to balance your goals for tax deferred wealth accumulation with the cost and complexity involved. Together with our plan specialists, we will help you to evaluate multiple plan design options and understand the impact they will have on you, your employees and the bottom line.

• Qualified Employee Education

  Qualified plan benefits are most effective when they are thoroughly understood and properly utilized by plan participants. Quality benefits education is not a one-time event but rather a long term program to build awareness, understanding and appreciation. we will work with you to develop and deliver a comprehensive education plan across multiple media to help produce positive results.

• Qualified Fiduciary Education

  As a retirement plan sponsor you face a sometimes bewildering array of regulations and responsibilities. It is important to find a source of trustworthy information to help you to manage your responsibilities and mitigate the associated risks. Let us help you to understand your options to develop an approach that works for you and your plan.

Business Planning

Whether you’re thinking about launching a new business or hoping to expand an existing one, we can help you create, grow and protect your business’s value with comprehensive business planning services.

We’ll work with you to develop a personalized financial plan with solutions designed to meet the unique needs of your business, with strategies to:

• Integrate all aspects of financial planning for your business and your personal life to ensure success on both fronts.
• Minimize risk by being prepared for the unexpected.
• Safeguard your business with coverage to help offset the loss of cash flow if you become sick or hurt.
• Recruit and retain employees with competitive benefits programs.
• Enhance your benefits programs to reward employees who are key to the success of your business.
• Transition your business smoothly with a properly designed and funded business succession plan.

Employee Benefits Planning

One of the biggest challenges faced by business owners today is the need to recruit, retain and reward talented employees. Good benefits planning can help you get the top talent.

Employee Benefits

We can help you design a quality, affordable benefit plan that may include features such as:

• Group health insurance
• Group life insurance
• Group disability income insurance
• Dental insurance
• Vision insurance
• Flexible spending accounts
• Qualified retirement plans such as SEP IRA or 401(k) plans

Group health services are offered through an independently owned and operated company, which offers access to comprehensive employee benefit services and is not affiliated with, nor a subsidiary of The Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company.

Executive Benefits Planning

We can help you design an executive benefits package that provides additional compensation to selected employees, which may include:

• A supplemental executive retirement plan that allows you to promise to pay additional income to yourself or your key employees at a later date, which is usually retirement.

• An executive deferred compensation plan that allows you or your key employees to forgo receipt of a portion of current income until a later date, which is usually retirement.

• Bonus plans that provide you or your key employees with additional income that can be used to purchase insurance, annuity or investment products.

Estate Planning

Most people associate the phrase "estate planning" with having a will – a legal document that names your beneficiaries and spells out who gets what when you die. And while the transfer of your assets is an important part of estate planning, a will or a trust is just one aspect of a broader estate planning strategy to ensure your wishes are known, honored and carried out as efficiently as possible when you're no longer able to articulate them.

We work with a team of estate planning experts at Northwestern Mutual. Together, we can help you develop an estate planning strategy that may include the following:

• A strategy to help reduce or eliminate gift/estate taxes for your heirs
• A plan to protect your estate from mismanagement or from claims of creditors or ex-spouses

 

In addition to the expertise our team can offer, you'll want to work with an estate-planning attorney to establish:

• Health care directives and a living will that specify the extent to which you want health care professionals to treat you if you become ill or incapacitated.
• Powers of attorney that grant people you trust the legal authority to act on your behalf in case of sudden accident or illness.
• A will or trust to ensure your assets are transferred according to your wishes. And Northwestern Mutual Wealth Management Company can serve as trustee, co-trustee or successor trustee in a wide range of situations.
• The naming of a legal guardian for children under the age of 18.

Disability Income Planning

Most people understand the need for health insurance, life insurance, homeowners insurance and car insurance. But what if the unexpected happened and you suddenly weren’t able to earn a living because of illness or injury? Not only would you have the stress of meeting everyday living expenses, you might also have to put other goals, like saving for retirement, on hold.

Disability income insurance can help you protect your most valuable asset – your ability to earn an income.

If your employer offers a comprehensive package of benefits, you may have access to group disability income insurance at work. That’s a great starting point, but most group plans cover only a portion of your income. Could you survive a 40 percent cut in pay? For that reason, you may want to consider supplementing group coverage with individual disability income insurance.

If you’re a business owner, you also need to think about whether your business would be able to continue without you. Disability overhead insurance reimburses certain business expenses, and key person disability insurance helps to minimize the loss of a key contributor due to disability.

Whether you own a business or not, consider disability income insurance a fundamental layer in your plan to secure your financial future.

Long-Term Care Planning

Most people hope to enjoy a long and healthy life as long as it’s on their own terms, which likely includes the desire to live as independently as possible. But life doesn’t always happen according to plan.

An unexpected accident, illness or injury can profoundly change your life — sometimes suddenly. And if it does, you may find yourself needing help with the tasks of everyday living.

Long-term care planning may be one of the most important steps you can take to ensure the future financial security of you and your family.

Special-Needs Planning

For the family of a person with special needs, financial planning is a necessity. Well-designed and properly executed special-needs planning can have a profound impact on your loved one’s quality of life and can help turn your dreams for his or her future into reality. A comprehensive plan can also help you avoid some common mistakes and oversights that could jeopardize the lifetime support of your loved one with special needs.

With so much at stake, it’s vital to work with professionals who understand the complexities of planning for a person with special needs. In fact, getting advice from someone without this expertise may do more harm than good.

That’s why it’s so important to seek help from a team of advisors who are experts in special-needs planning. In our experience, the most valuable teams include an attorney, a financial professional and a social services professional, as each brings specific areas of expertise to the table that are needed to develop a comprehensive special-needs plan.

We can help you build your team of experts and coordinate efforts on your behalf. With our collective guidance, you’ll be empowered to make informed decisions, take appropriate actions and help provide the highest possible quality of life for those who depend on you.