The Advisor Team - Best Practices

By Jeanette Bednar

Jarvis Management is a bookkeeping and billpay service for aging adults and busy

professionals. In our work, we are dealing with a client’s finances, financial planning and

personal planning. Needless to say, we get to know our clients well.

With aging, declining parents and busy, caregiving children, it is easy for things to be

overlooked. This includes routine bills, such as credit card bills, medical bills and subscriptions. But it also includes life insurance premium payments, records for tax returns, asset management (and perhaps consolidation of accounts), coordination of beneficiary designations on retirement plans, estate planning documents, and overall tax and estate planning.

The best practices we see among our clients includes three important steps. First, a client

must have an excellent team of trusted advisors. This includes a CPA, financial advisor,

insurance advisor and trusts and estates attorney.

Second, the advisors must have transparency and be able to talk to each other and

coordinate. For example, the most common bad and unintended situation that we see involves a failure to coordinate between a client’s disposition of assets under his or her Will, and conflicting beneficiary designations on his or her bank or investment accounts. Transparency among the advisors can usually be addressed by group e-mails that include all of the advisors.

Third, a client should have an annual meeting that includes all of his or her advisors to (1)

review any changes in the past year, (2) map out financial goals for the coming year, and (3)

make sure the client’s financial planning is coordinated.

At Jarvis Management, we help clients stay organized, pay their bills, handle their

bookkeeping, and keep an eye out for potential fraud. We also strive to improve communication among the client, the family and the client’s team of advisors.