Life Planning Partners Update
What a year! We are so glad to close the books on 2020 and start anew.
Being the “glass mostly full” type of people, the Life Planning Partners crew embraced “COVID avoidance” and thankfully escaped any illness. Throughout, we managed to take care of the ongoing planning in addition to the challenges COVID presented throughout the year – market upheavals, tax rule changes, and paying attention to the never-ending news cycle for events that may affect our client’s financial situation. It was a whirlwind and we are glad a vaccine is on the horizon.
Thanks to all of you for your kindness, responsiveness, and resiliency throughout the year. We managed to get through tax planning without a hiccup, and completed almost all of the estate plans, insurance plans, and updated projections. We are ready for whatever 2021 throws our way!
One other small accomplishment – Carolyn was invited to contribute a chapter to the book, “How I Invest My Money” – it ended up being a top business book for the year and is a fun read. Let us know if you want a copy and we’ll send one your way.
Donations for the Year:
We forgot to mention the Life Planning Partners charitable contributions for 2020 in our annual card. We change it up year to year and pick charities that are supported by our clients. With the pandemic, we thought it best to contribute to those most in need due to issues with COVID. Our donations this year went to Waste Not Want Not, United Way of Northeast Florida COVID Relief, and Jacksonville Legal Aid.
What are the plans for 2021?
- Many of you ask when we plan on taking new clients. We continue to stay closed to new clients for at least another year. We have the capacity for more clients and hope the vaccine will help restore some normalcy before we consider reopening.
- Until the COVID numbers decrease, we will continue to staff the office one at a time. We are happy to have in-person meetings but only one to two of us will be in the office for those meetings and of course we will all mask up!
- We began searching for another planner in 2020. It is important to find the right person, so we have been very picky. There is good news on this front – we have extended an offer to an upcoming graduate from a stellar financial planning degree program. We’ll announce more closer to her graduation date.
- We really appreciated your response to our survey this fall. We plan to refine some of our processes as a result.
- Carolyn continues to speak at virtual conferences about the intersections of health and personal finance. Her latest talk, “Financial Planning in the Age of COVID” has been a hit and is updated as we discover how COVID will change personal finance.
- Joey and Carolyn were asked to co-present at a major conference to share our process for bringing the next generation of planners into the fold. We are very excited that other planners are interested in our very unique business model and want us to share our story.
- Carolyn has been asked to write a monthly column for a major publication starting in February. More news on that once it is out!
We plan to hit the ground running starting January 4th. Tax letters are ready to go and will be released once we can check pending numbers against official tax forms. We’ll restart the planning cycle of estate, insurance, and projection planning, and of course, Tim is staying abreast of the market and rebalancing regularly. Routine is nice when the world allows it.
As always, let us know your questions and how we can do better. And most of all – we wish you a fantastic 2021!
The LPP Team
