Wednesday marks World Financial Planning Day. Rebecca Walser, president and founder of Walser Wealth Management, joined Cheddar News to discuss why financial planning is important, how it can be done and why it's best to start early.

<div class="block">Wednesday marks World Financial Planning Day. Rebecca Walser, president and founder of Walser Wealth Management, joined Cheddar News to discuss why financial planning is important, how it can be done and why it&#39;s best to start early.</div>

Stretching Your Dollar

Stretching Your Dollar: Why Financial Planning Is Important

Today's World Financial Planning Day. And what better way to celebrate than right here on stretching your dollar. Joining me for the occasion and to help us better understand some important financial topics is President of Walzer Wealth Management, Rebecca Walzer. Rebecca, thanks so much for joining. Thanks for having me. So let's start with the basics. Why is financial planning so important? Well, I mean, I think if you don't have a plan question, you're going to fail. There are so many things that can go wrong if you um have an emergency that you weren't prepared for. If you lose a job. If you lose a spouse, if you lose, lose a income earner prematurely, all of these things can come up. Um If you have massive inflation Corona virus, I mean, you know, shut down all of these things can come up and without a financial plan that really kind of gives you benchmarks on at least. Uh you know, what should I be at 30? What should I be at 40? What should I be at, at 50? It's really hard if you don't have that plan to really be at where you should be by retirement. So you need milestones and those only come with and through planning. Yeah. Ok. So what advice Rebecca do you have to, people who might be intimidated by this topic? It's always scary because I think people don't want to know that they haven't done enough and so that it's better to just act like they have and not find out. But the truth is, is that without really understanding what you need to be building on a systematic basis, if people were to start early, it's not that much. But if you start late, it's a lot. And that is the problem. So the best thing to do is don't avoid the topic and ingrain it into your Children to really start so early. If we become as a society, early savers and early planners, we will save and, and fix a lot of our retirement problem. Where should someone start when it comes to creating a financial plan? Well, the first thing that people need to understand, Kristen is you're on Wall Street, you know, we're in the money management, space and world, but financial planning is different. You can't go to a Wall Street stock broker or Wall Street money manager and expect to get financial planning that deals with risk management and tax character of assets and income planning and income needs and the state planning. All of those things are way, way, way beyond money management and people are, you know, misconstruing getting a statement as a financial plan. So, the first thing to understand is where do you need to go? You need to go to a planning firm or a planner doesn't? Or it could be a big firm, could be a Wall Street firm even. But it needs to be with the planning department, a specialty department. It cannot just be a money manager. So that's a really big misnomer that we have in financial parlance in America that people think that everybody is a financial planner and it's just not true. Yeah. So what exactly does the financial planner do? Rebecca? And uh do you think it's something that people should consider at what point in their life? Yes. So I think the financial planning is money management. It is definitely a piece of money management. That's one piece and you could have the same financial plan or doing your money management or not, but it's also tax planning, estate planning, generational wealth planning, income planning. Like specifically we want to know what year you want to retire and how much of our after tax cash flow needs do we have on a yearly basis? And you know, we need to plan differently for women. We women live 5 to 7 years longer than our male counterpart at the same age and we die more sickly. So we usually have some kind of long term care needs. So all of these things go into financial planning, which you can see Chris is way beyond just wealth management, money management of what my investments are doing on an annual basis. So, here's a question. What's one thing that, you know, as a financial planner that you think others don't? But that they definitely should. Well, they don't know that you actually have to have a plan. They think that a statement from a Wall Street firm is a, is a financial plan and everyone's like, here's my plan and it's the, you know, their, their actual statement of their balance. And so what I know is that I can reverse engineer, someone can tell me the year they want to retire and the amount of income they one on the after tax basis and we can pretty much give a mortality age based on longevity of their family. And I can know how much at any age someone should have already saved or invested. And if they don't have it, then we can come up with a catch up plan. So the financial planning process is really reverse engineering and that's what people need to know all about. What does someone need to know about combating financial misinformation? Oh, wow. This is a huge one as you know, with the explosion of the internet, youtube, there's all kinds of people that are prognosticating uh that are lay people and there's nothing wrong with that, but just make sure that you understand, if you like a certain person understand their credentials, you know, for myself, you know, I have five different financial and for uh tax related law credentials. And so you just need to make sure that the person you're listening to is not, uh, if they're not an expert, don't take it as expert advice. And the other thing I would say, Chris is a lot of these social media. I see so many prognosticators out there that are, you know, giving advice, uh, blatantly financial advice and they just don't have any idea what talking about. So really watch the do it yourselfers that are giving you advice because you just don't know. Uh and they have no, they have no compliance or regulatory authority overseeing what they're saying. So be very careful. Are there any uh specific misinformation campaigns, topics, Rebecca that you've witnessed of late, almost like a scam that our viewers should know about? You know, I haven't seen anything as of late. I think that any time the banking, like we had in the spring March, you know, the banking crisis kind of percolating up and, and you definitely saw a lot of doomsday saying no, this is the end of America and this is gonna be a bank run and I do see financial transition in process, but I just think that there's a lot of doomsday out there that really try to freak people out and, and ask them to go buy certain things. Uh and, and, and just be, be very careful because any time there's any kind of financial, uh you know, change. And certainly if we go into some kind of financial situation here at the end of this year, because I'm expecting, I'm expecting the markets to definitely correct. You will have people that are trying to capitalize on that that are, that maybe shouldn't be ok. Got it. I finally, Becca, I know obviously coming up with the plan, speaking to an expert is key other resources to make sure that you do it right. What would you tell our viewers? There's all kinds of free resources. Um You can go to the certified financial planning board, they have all kinds of free resources on financial planning and I think it just gives people a really good overview of the financial planning process and, and, and they'll understand there's really seven areas and money management and managing your investments is only one of those seven areas. So it's a much broader topic when we're talking about financial planning.