Our Family Focus® Process
The Five Critical Elements of Financial Planning
Since 1997, Financial Enhancement Group (FEG) has helped families prepare for retirement through retirement planning services that are simple, repeatable, and deeply personal. At the heart of our approach is our trademarked Family Focus® Process, built around the five critical elements of financial planning.
This is more than a checklist. It’s a comprehensive financial planning process designed to help you navigate complexity with clarity and confidence, so that you can focus on what matters most: your life, your family and loved ones, and your legacy.
The Five Critical Elements of Financial Planning
Your Life After Work
Our commitment is to be your financial guide/partner as you direct Your Life After Work™. Understanding the most tax-efficient methods of drawing your income in retirement is the key!
Tax Planning
Our investment team manages your family's assets with tax repercussions in mind and uses multiple strategies to capitalize on current tax policy.
Investment Playbook
We are fiduciaries, obligated by law to treat your money as if it were our own, as if we were in the same situation. We take that role very seriously.
Risk Management & Life Happens
By removing emotional reactions to commonly critical decisions, we partner alongside you and your family, providing informed responses to protect, protect your hard-earned assets.
Legacy Planning
Your legacy is about more than just money. You deserve to have your hopes, values, and resources conveyed to your beneficiaries using a simple, cost-effective, and manageable structure.
Your Life After Work™
Our commitment is to be your financial guide and partner as you transition from your working years into retirement. Whether you're stepping away from full-time employment or simply shifting how you spend your days, this phase is about freedom, purpose, and making the most of what you’ve built.
The families we work with aren’t just retiring from something… they’re retiring to something. That could mean traveling, volunteering, starting a new business, spending more time with family, or simply having the flexibility to choose how each day is lived.
But freedom requires planning.
Our role is to help you:
- Transition into retirement with a plan tailored to your goals
- Understand the true cost of lifestyle and healthcare
- Make informed decisions around Social Security and income streams
- Reduce confusion and stress around withdrawals, taxes, and timing
It isn’t simple, but we want your retirement plan to feel simple, so that you can focus on Your Life After Work™.
Tax Planning
Our financial planning and investment team manages your family's assets with tax repercussions in mind and uses multiple strategies to help best capitalize on current tax policy.
We believe tax planning isn’t a once-a-year event. It’s a year-round, forward-looking strategy that can have a major impact on your financial journey.
We work to maximize results by minimizing tax exposure (today and in the future) so that your resources go further.
Tax decisions are influenced by life. We regularly ask:
- Are you planning to retire soon?
- Have you started Social Security?
- Did you make a large charitable gift (or want to)?
- Are you over 70.5 and giving from an IRA?
These moments often uncover opportunities (or risks) that tax planning can address.
We believe tax decisions should never be separated from your investment and income strategy. By integrating tax strategy and planning into every step of our process, we help families reduce regret and make more confident financial choices.
Investment Playbook
We are legal fiduciaries, bound to treat your investments as if they were our own. That’s not just a promise, it’s our responsibility. Our Investment Playbook is designed to align your portfolio with your goals, risk tolerance, and evolving needs.
Our approach is evidence-based, flexible, and personal. We manage assets using multiple models, from aggressive growth to preservation, tailored to the phase you are in… on your financial journey.
We combine:
Fundamental
company research
Technical analysis of market movement
Demographic and economic trends
A focus on tax
efficiency
Because we are an independent Registered Investment Advisor (RIA), we are not tied to banks or fund families. We seek what’s best for you, not what benefits someone else.
Our goal is not to beat an arbitrary index. It’s to help you meet your real-life goals, whether that’s retirement income, philanthropy, or passing down a legacy. Risk awareness, cost control, and long-term thinking guide every decision we make on your behalf.
Risk Management & Life Happens
By removing emotional reactions to common critical decisions, we partner alongside you and your family, providing informed responses to help protect your hard-earned assets.
Life brings unexpected challenges… some joyful, others difficult. Whether it’s helping a child with tuition, navigating the cost of long-term care for a parent, or managing the financial impact of buying a second home, these choices can affect your financial journey.
Our role is to help you:
- Identify potential roadblocks in your financial plan
- Evaluate the impact of major life decisions
- Explore solutions that help protect your income and lifestyle
- Adjust your strategy when “life happens”
We’re here to walk with you through the unknown, so that you never feel like you’re figuring it out alone.
Legacy Planning
Your legacy is about more than just money. You deserve to have your hopes, values, and resources conveyed to your beneficiaries using a simple, cost-effective, and manageable structure.
You’ve worked hard not only to build wealth, but also to build meaning. Many of the families we serve want their assets to support their own needs today while ensuring what’s left behind is preserved, respected, and transferred with clarity.
That’s why we help ensure your assets are titled and organized properly, transitions to heirs are simple, and confusion or delays are minimized.
We also walk families through a few essential questions:
- What should your legacy look like?
- Who will act as trustee and why does that matter?
- What assets go in a trust and what doesn’t?
- Who inherits your IRA and when do they receive it?
In addition, we help ensure that essential legal documents (like your will, healthcare directive, and power of attorney) are thoughtfully prepared and up to date.
Family legacy planning isn’t just about what you leave. It’s about how you leave it, and how it reflects who you are. You deserve peace of mind in completing your financial journey.
What’s The “Unspoken” & Secret Sixth Element That Makes FEG, FEG?
While the Five Critical Elements are the foundation, here’s a thread that runs through them all: Relationships.
Your relationship with your family, your advisors, your community, and the causes you care about, shapes every decision you make.
At FEG, we call this Being a Better Giver. It’s about aligning your time, talents, and resources with the impact you want to have, both now and for generations to come. We consider it the quiet, unspoken element that holds the rest together and one that can make every other part of your financial journey more meaningful.