It is of paramount importance to develop a clear understanding of your financial picture and set reasonable expectations for your financial future. Financial planning helps set a path to achieve financial goals and milestones, simplify your life, and allow you to make smart choices through informed decisions.
As you age, you will likely experience major life changes such as an increase or decrease in income, dependents, and an expansion of financial responsibilities. It is crucial to revisit your financial planning, investments, and estate plans, and track your progress throughout your various money milestones across the decades of your personal wealth journey. Below, we break down what we believe are the top wealth planning priorities in each decade of life.
You spend your career helping others stay healthy. But when was the last time you gave your finances a check-up?
As your career progresses and your wealth grows, financial planning often becomes less about individual decisions and more about making sure everything works together. Your investments, taxes, retirement strategy, estate plan, insurance, and long-term goals should all support the same financial picture.
See where your financial plan stands—and where it may deserve a closer look.
1. Is Your Investment Strategy Still Right for You?
As your wealth grows, your investment strategy should evolve with it.
- Does your asset allocation reflect your current goals and risk tolerance?
- Are your investments coordinated across all your accounts?
- Are you overly concentrated in any one investment, company, or asset class?
- Are you considering taxes when deciding where investments are held?
- Is your portfolio regularly monitored and rebalanced?
A well-designed investment strategy should align asset allocation with your broader financial goals while accounting for ongoing portfolio monitoring and adjustments.
Check-up question: Is your portfolio simply invested, or is it built around your financial plan?
2. Are You Managing Taxes Proactively?
For high-earning medical professionals, taxes can have a meaningful impact on long-term wealth.
- Are investment decisions being made with tax implications in mind?
- Have you reviewed asset location across taxable and tax-advantaged accounts?
- Are tax-loss harvesting opportunities being evaluated when appropriate?
- Are retirement accounts incorporated into your broader tax strategy?
- Are your financial advisor and tax professional coordinating where appropriate?
A proactive tax strategy should consider how investments, retirement accounts, and tax-planning opportunities work together to support your broader financial goals.
Check-up question: Are you planning for taxes throughout the year, or primarily addressing them at tax time?
3. Is Your Retirement Strategy Built Around the Life You Want?
Reaching retirement with significant assets is only part of the equation. Your plan should also address when you want to retire, how you want to live, and how your assets will support that lifestyle.
- Do you have a clear target retirement date?
- Have you estimated the lifestyle your assets need to support?
- Are you making effective use of available retirement plans?
- Have you considered how and when different accounts may eventually be used?
- Have you tested whether your current strategy keeps you on track?
A thoughtful retirement strategy can help physicians align their accumulated wealth with their long-term goals and desired lifestyle.
Check-up question: Do you know what you want your retirement to look like—and whether your financial plan can support it?
4. Is Your Wealth Adequately Protected?
A strong wealth plan considers what could go wrong as carefully as what could go right.
- Have you recently reviewed your insurance coverage?
- Is your income appropriately protected?
- Does your life insurance still reflect your family’s circumstances?
- Have your coverage needs changed as your wealth has grown?
- If you own a medical practice, have you considered how that changes your broader financial picture?
Insurance review and asset protection become increasingly important as a medical professional’s career and financial situation evolve.
Check-up question: If something unexpected happened tomorrow, would your financial plan continue to work as intended?
5. Has Your Estate Plan Kept Pace With Your Wealth?
An estate plan created years ago may no longer reflect your family, assets, or intentions today. It’s important to revisit as your career and wealth grow.
- Are your will and estate planning documents current?
- Have you reviewed beneficiary designations?
- Does your estate plan reflect your current assets and family circumstances?
- Have you considered how you want wealth transferred to future generations or charitable organizations?
- Are your estate planning and financial strategies coordinated?
For established medical professionals, an up-to-date estate plan helps ensure accumulated wealth is protected and transferred as intended.
Check-up question: Does your estate plan reflect the wealth and life you have today, or the one you had when the documents were created?
6. Does Your Financial Plan Account for the Bigger Picture?
Investment performance is only one measure of financial health. Your plan should connect your wealth to the goals it is ultimately intended to support.
- Do you have an up-to-date personal balance sheet?
- Do you understand your current and projected cash flow?
- Have you modeled major future goals and expenses?
- Have you considered how a career change or earlier retirement could affect your plan?
- Do you know whether your current trajectory supports your long-term goals?
Beacon Pointe’s physician planning process uses a personal balance sheet and cash-flow projections to evaluate a medical professional’s broader financial situation and create a long-term financial plan.
Check-up question: Does your financial plan give you the flexibility to achieve your long-term goals?
7. Is Everything Working Together?
As wealth grows, financial decisions rarely exist in isolation. An investment decision can have tax implications. A retirement decision can affect an estate plan. A career change can alter cash flow, insurance needs, and long-term projections.
The final check is whether all those pieces are coordinated.
- Are your investment, tax, retirement, and estate strategies aligned?
- Are your financial professionals communicating when appropriate?
- Is your financial plan updated when your life changes?
- Do you review your progress regularly?
- Do you have a clear understanding of what deserves attention next?
Beacon Pointe takes a dynamic approach to financial planning, helping medical professionals adapt their strategies as their careers, wealth, and priorities evolve.
Check-up question: Do you have several financial strategies, or one coordinated wealth plan?
How Did Your Financial Check-Up Look?
Medical professionals often already have many of the individual components of a financial plan in place. The bigger question is whether those pieces are optimized, coordinated, and aligned with what matters most to you.
As your career and wealth evolve, your financial plan should evolve with them.
At Beacon Pointe, our allWEALTH® approach brings investment management and financial planning together to help medical professionals evaluate their complete financial picture throughout all decades of life, and build a plan around their individual goals and priorities.
Ready for a second opinion on your financial plan? Learn how Beacon Pointe helps medical professionals coordinate their wealth and plan for what comes next.
If you could benefit from a conversation with our advisory team, we would be happy to provide a complimentary consultation.
Important Disclosure: Beacon Pointe Advisors does not offer legal or tax advice. Please consult with the appropriate tax or legal professional regarding your circumstances. This information is not intended and should not be relied upon as individualized tax, legal, fiduciary, or investment advice. Only a tax or legal professional may recommend the application of this general information to any particular situation or prepare an instrument chosen to implement any design discussed herein. Nothing herein should be relied upon as personalized investment advice, nor should it be considered an individualized recommendation, offer or solicitation for the purchase or sale of any security or to adopt a specific investment strategy. An investor should consult with their financial professional before making any investment decisions. Beacon Pointe is not responsible for errors or omissions in the material on third-party websites and does not necessarily approve or endorse the information provided.