Professionals and Executives
As a high level executive, there are many special considerations and unique challenges when creating a financial plan. Your financial situation is closely tied to the fortunes of your company and your career and as such, your investment portfolio is typically highly concentrated in employer shares and stock options. Additionally, you are extremely busy and spend much of your time focused on your work and need a thinking partner that is looking after your finanical affiars to ensure your wealth is managed effectively.
Retire as Anticipated
Most professionals and executives are continually reinventing themselves as their career and responsibilities grow and change. Typically, most professionals and executives do not traditionally retire but transition to new passions, such as serving on boards or starting new entrepreneurial ventures. Retirement can often bring many finanical challenges such as a shift to entering the stage where your assets become your primary source of retirement income along with other income sources like government and private pensions. Our team is able to help create a retirement strategy for you that is focus on replacing your cash flow to maintain your lifestyle while do so on a tax efficient manner. When creating a retirment strategy, it is not just a one time plan but a living document that grows and changes as your goals change throughout each stage of retirement.
Transfer Wealth and Leaving a Legacy
One key consideration for executives is to create an estate plan with you, your attorney and accountant to create an estate plan for you and your family. By creating a holistic wealth plan, you can effectively withdraw funds for your retirement, pass assets to future generations and minimizing estate taxes. By using all your advisors to create a plan using all the tools available including trusts, lifetime gifting to children, philanthropic gifts and creating private foundations, creating a family giving plan to minimze family conflicts and ensure your legacy is passed on as per your wishes.
Protect Your Family
One aspect of a holistic finanical plan is ensuring your family is protected in the event that something happened to you or your spouse. For many high net worth executives, the additional costs of life insurance may not make sense when you have the ability to self-insure but should still be considered as it may be easier alternative than self-insurance. For example, with real estate assets, self-insurance may not make sense due to illiquidity of the assets and other tax considerations that may be more cost restricitve than using insurance.
Maximize Your Equity Compensation
For many professionals and executives, restricted stock and stock options are potentially valuable perks that can go a long way to your financial goals, but can be exceedingly complex and failure to understand how they work can lead to not fully maximizing these benefits. While your employer is required to detail every aspect of equity compensation, you are responsible for understanding the rules, for example, what happens if you decide to retire? What are the difference between the various type of options or restricted stock versus restricted stock units? Our team is able to help you answer these question and maximize your equity compensation so you can meet your financial goals.
Customized Portfolio Solutions To Incorporate Concentrated Stock Positions
For many executives and professionals, equity compensation can lead to highly concentrated stock positions with your employer's stock. This can lead to your financial portfolio to be overly concentrated which may or may not be completely aligned to your financial goals. For example, an executive who is retiring may want to use his financial assets to generate income but has a concentrated stock position in a company which does not pay a dividend. Our team is able to help create a strategy to provide you with diversification to reduce volatility in your investment portfolio while doing so on a tax efficient basis.
Executive Banking with BMO Private Banking
With help from our BMO Private Banking partners, our team is able to provide customized banking solutions for professionals and executives to meet their busy schedules. BMO Private Banking is able to create banking, lending and payment solutions for you to help save you time and simplify your finanical life. Additionally with our partners at BMO Commercial Banking and BMO Corporate Finance, we are able to offer high level banking services for your company regardless of size and structure.