Opes creates your Personal Balance Sheet that includes all of your assets and liabilities, and puts it at the center of your financial life.

When planning for retirement, you need to anticipate relevant issues and decisions so that you can prepare effectively. To establish that forward-looking mindset, Opes Advisors devised a new approach, Personal Balance Sheet Planning – the process of generating and “architecting” the composition of your personal balance sheet over time so that it will produce sufficient liquidity to cover all of your cash flow needs through your working life and your income needs in retirement.

Commonly, financial reviews include only a historical view – a report of returns and portfolio performance on liquid assets, like stocks and bonds.  When planning is included, discussions often focus only on financial forecasts and projections, and do not sufficiently prepare actions and strategies that will produce a satisfying retirement. Furthermore, most retirement planning is centered on the misguided notion that net worth is the key to a happy retirement – when often net worth is tied up in assets like your home, investment property, stock options or business, and it is not accessible for liquidity or to generate cash income when needed.

Personal Balance Sheet Planning is focused on making sure you have sufficient income-generating capital at work.

Personal Balance Sheet “Architecting"

Balance sheet architecting is the process of generating a balance sheet composition that will produce sufficient liquidity to cover your cash flow needs throughout your working life and through retirement. The five components to architecting are:

1. Establish your personal balance sheet, comprised of all assets and liabilities broken down into liquid and non-liquid components, using our proprietary Opes Advantage software.

2. Analyze and assess the balance sheet and identify total balance sheet risk, total balance sheet diversification and potential future breakdowns where liquidity may not be sufficient to provide for retirement needs.

3. Develop a strategy to transform your balance sheet with respect to net worth, capital at work, income generating capital at work, total risk, total return, diversification and composition.

4. Follow through on the strategy to achieve the appropriate structure of the your balance sheet over time.

5. Annual planning and updating of your personal balance sheet to ensure the actions taken by you and by us are on target and consistent with what is necessary to turn out the life and retirement that together we have designed for you.

Plan for Future Liquidity Needs – Build a Pragmatic Plan

For many people who have high net worth, planning for your assets to be “liquid” at the right times in life is of the utmost importance. And it is absolutely essential to have this sort of a plan for when you stop working.

Many people don’t address this concern until it’s too late to have good options available to them and most firms do not have the expertise across both stock, bond and real estate asset classes to address these concerns. They think of retirement assets as stocks and bonds, because they can be sold to generate income. However, in many instances, people don’t have a sufficient amount of capital in these assets, and they are forced to sell their house or business to generate the cash they need. Without sufficient planning, this can cause tremendous breakdowns. Opes Advisors wants to prevent those breakdowns.

Our standards and our process for retirement preparation are explicit, pragmatic and actionable. With Opes, you will know exactly what to do to achieve the goals you set for yourself.  Working with you, we specify what you need to do and when you need to do it.  We offer a guide to what’s important and how to move forward.

Personal Balance Sheet Planning is a practice for those who are serious about planning for a satisfying and happy retirement – replete with choice and possibility, not forced decisions and compromise.

See the Big Picture and Conflicting Tradeoffs When You Plan

With an Opes Personal Balance Sheet, every aspect of your financial life is in one place – stocks, fixed income, real estate and real estate financing. We show you the total return of your financial life, both now and in different scenarios over different periods of time. We work with you to consider what conflicting tradeoffs you might have to resolve when making important financial decisions, and how to balance each one within your long-term goals.

With Opes Advantage software, your Personal Balance Sheet can be easily updated. When you reach a crucial Financial Decision Planning Moment, you cannot wait for six weeks for a financial planner to create a new plan. You need to be able to update easily and change your plan on the fly.

Adjust for Shifting Priorities

Regularly revisiting your plan helps accommodate changes, from the big obvious transitions to the subtle shifts in direction. We often forget how much we can change in our priorities from one year to the next – or how much the world can change. An annual revision helps incorporate those changes.

Structuring your entire balance sheet properly - not just one component or another - will enable you to retire effectively. You can only get there with proper planning and effective financial decisions along the way.