As the weather gets warmer as we move toward summer, one thing on everyone’s mind is spring cleaning. Just as your home benefits from a thorough refresh, so do your clients’ financial portfolios and plans.
This season presents the perfect opportunity to dust off investment strategies, clear out inefficient tax approaches, and organize financial roadmaps for the months ahead.
The following five essential planning items will help position your clients for financial success throughout the year.
1. Spring review meetings
Spring review meetings provide the perfect opportunity to reconnect with clients, assess progress toward their financial goals, and address any changes in their personal or financial situation. These meetings should be scheduled strategically from mid-April through mid-July.
Meeting structure:
- Strategic portfolio adjustments: Propose portfolio reallocations, tax strategies, or plan modifications based on current market conditions and your clients’ circumstances.
- Financial progress review: Present an updated Plan Summary to review plan projections with a long-term outlook and discuss any significant changes in your clients’ family, career, health, or goals.
- Revisit estate plans: Discuss existing estate plans to help ensure the necessary documents and beneficiaries are in place (and encourage clients to create a plan if they have not done so already).
- Action item assignment: Clearly document next steps for both parties with specific details and deadlines.
Following the meeting, send a follow-up email within 48 hours summarizing key discussion points, decisions made, and action items with deadlines.
Pro tip: Offer clients the option of meeting in-person, virtually, or over the phone to make scheduling easy!
2. Semi-annual investment deep dive
Every spring perform advanced and thorough portfolio reviews for your clients at least semi-annually. This is a good time to help them understand in depth how they’re doing and the progress made on their investment goals. Review portfolios as a whole and their individual positions and compare them to portfolio and personal risk scores.
What to include:
- Detailed performance review of each holding
- Comparison to benchmarks and risk metrics
- Portfolio allocation adjustments based on market conditions
- Assessment of whether investments continue to support clients’ financial objectives
Key topics to discuss:
- Changes in risk profiles or market conditions since last review
- Recommendations for rebalancing or repositioning
- Performance relative to goals and benchmarks
Schedule these deep dives throughout the spring season. These meetings also serve as general check-ups regarding any major changes in clients’ lives, health, or goals.
Pro tip: Before each meeting, run a portfolio summary which highlights performance against key benchmarks relative to the portfolio risk score. Create and review a custom portfolio positions spreadsheet that provides insights regarding how portfolios are structured. This summary helps clients quickly grasp their investment performance and makes complex investment information more digestible. The review could also present findings and trigger planning opportunities to consider (i.e. tax strategies, estate-planning strategies, etc.).
3. Mid-year tax strategy review
The spring season is tax season! This offers a perfect opportunity to analyze potential tax strategies including portfolio rebalancing, tax-loss trading, and capital gain harvesting to optimize your clients’ tax positions.
Focus areas:
- Year-to-date realized gains and losses
- Opportunities for tax-loss harvesting
- Strategic rebalancing with tax implications in mind
- Capital gain distribution forecasts
Action items for clients:
- Share their tax returns once filed
- Review preliminary tax projections for current year
- Identify strategies to minimize current-year tax burden
- Consider the impact of any anticipated income changes
Pro tip: Be sure to request clients share their tax returns once filed. Use a 12-Point Tax Return Review Checklist during meetings and personalize strategies to meet each client’s unique needs. Have professional development resources and client-facing materials available to help address specific financial situations.
4. Proactive financial plan updates to focus on long-term goals
Use this time of year to update financial plans based on any new data received during the previous season. The Plan Summary should highlight key figures and projections such as net worth, guaranteed income, account type breakdown, Monte Carlo success rate, etc. Also consider holding In Case of Emergency (“ICE”) meetings, to help prepare clients for the unexpected. These meetings provide a structured approach to organizing all critical information and instructions that families and trusted advisors will need in an emergency or after a client’s passing. This proactive planning process helps prevent confusion, reduces stress for grieving loved ones, and helps ensure clients’ wishes are properly carried out.
Elements to update:
- Net worth calculation and trajectory
- Guaranteed income sources and projections
- Account type breakdown and allocation
- Monte Carlo success rate simulations
- Progress toward specific financial goals
In Case of Emergency (“ICE”) meetings: Use updates to review emergency preparedness:
- Confirm key contacts and fiduciaries
- Review document locations and access procedures
- Discuss financial transition protocols in case of incapacity or death
Pro tip: Appreciate each client’s unique needs based on their family situation and goals. Creating thoughtful plans modeling inflation and spending over several decades can help ensure clients don’t outlive their assets. It’s also important to stress test plans by running scenarios that incorporate potential loss of income (for working clients) or potential long-term care expenses. This helps identify any gaps in planning that need to be addressed.
5. Estate plan review
While reviewing everything else, it only makes sense to conduct thorough reviews of clients’ estate planning documents! After reviewing, provide summaries which outline fiduciaries, beneficiaries and provide key observations to consider. Also review gifting opportunities, deathbed planning, estate tax risk, and charitable giving considerations.
Review checklist:
- Estate document summary and recommendations
- Fiduciary and beneficiary designations
- Gifting opportunities and strategies
- Deathbed planning considerations
- Estate tax risk assessment
- Charitable giving integration
The key here is to view estate planning holistically: understanding the players, aligning their roles, creating clarity, and ensuring precise implementation. This approach protects clients’ assets while providing peace of mind for them and their families.
Pro tip: A vital aspect of estate planning is helping clients understand their estate plans! Every estate plan should come with an executive summary or memo outlining key provisions and laying out the plan. Clients will often need to request this summary, unfortunately, but it is critical. Estate attorneys often provide scattered documents rather than cohesive plans. This is why requesting a “waterfall”—a step-by-step outline that shows who receives what, when, and under what conditions—so that clients can track the money flow is important so they can visualize the plan once all of these complicated decisions are put into motion.
By conducting thorough investment reviews, optimizing tax strategies, updating financial plans, and reviewing estate documents, you provide comprehensive value to support your clients’ continued financial success.
Click the image and zoom in for more detail.
While these five essential items highlight an intensive focus during the spring months, proactive financial planning is a continuous, year-round process. Spring’s activities build upon work done in previous seasons and set the stage for the months ahead.
In addition, each season presents opportunities to review progress, showcase your commitment to clients’ success, and deliver measurable value.
Just as spring cleaning refreshes homes and creates space for new possibilities, these financial planning activities clear the path for continued financial success.