Frequently Asked Questions

For most, financial success is the result of planning, dedication, and hard work. To get where you are today, you had a plan, but to get where you want to be tomorrow, you need a new plan. Today, more than ever, your choices impact more people and have longer-lasting effects.

With this in mind, we help you identify your goals and objectives and prioritize what’s most important to you. Once we understand your current financial status and your future goals, we generate a gap analysis to show you where you are today versus where you need to be tomorrow. Your personalized financial plan will help you optimize your cash flow, manage your investments, build or navigate your retirement plan, save for private school or college education, help protect your assets, identify and resolve tax and estate issues, and more.

After your plan is complete, we help you get financially organized and set you up with your own personal financial website, a private and secure vault where your data is consolidated into one clear picture. We deliver a written report and save a copy to your online vault so you can track your progress. Learn more about our approach, and let us know if you have questions!

We create flexible and easy-to-understand financial plans that map out a course to pursue your purpose. We prioritize your goals as we build your plan, then we provide a detailed cash flow projection so we can show you the advantages of following the plan. Our technology allows you to monitor your progress on a personal website we create for you where you can securely store all your important financial documents like wills, trusts, insurance, and investment performance statements.

We also believe a financial plan should target more than just your goals. A good financial plan should incorporate fee analysis, investment management, insurance, risk analysis, tax and estate planning strategies, and coordination with key partners like your attorney and CPA. In addition to building your plan, we will guide you through the implementation and monitoring phase to ensure success. A plan without proper follow-through isn’t a plan.

Most financial plans are built around your goals and priorities. However, just focusing on that leaves a lot of risks and missed opportunities on the table. That's why we look at your full financial picture when building your plan.

We review and present complex wealth strategies like budget and cash flow planning; mortgage, student loan, and debt analysis and payoff strategies; real estate investment opportunities; tax-efficient wealth accumulation and distribution plans; comprehensive insurance analysis, including long-term care insurance, life insurance, disability insurance, home insurance, auto insurance, and umbrella insurance; multi-faceted retirement planning; social security planning; generational wealth transfer through various trust vehicles; charitable aspiration planning; understanding laws and techniques around taxes, property transfer, and estate planning; partner introductions to other professionals like CPAs, attorneys, bankers, business valuation teams, and insurance agents; and much more. 

Our team at Provista has found that many people do not understand the types of investments they own, how much they own of them, and the purpose of those investments. Often, we find people's investments among IRAs, 401ks, and investment accounts can become cluttered, too concentrated, or even too diversified. 

We educate you on what you own and let you know what is helping or hurting in your portfolio for the goals you are trying to achieve. We strive to be very transparent about our investment philosophy and to customize your investment strategy to help meet your goals and objectives in a cost-effective and tax-efficient way.

At Provista, we take our time to understand what you are trying to achieve with your wealth as well as the amount of risk you are comfortable taking. We analyze your investments to match both risk tolerance and goal achievability. We offer a complimentary analysis showing you how your investments compare to benchmarks, typical industry fees, and appropriate risk. 

We'll identify any areas that could be holding your portfolio back from success and help you understand what you own so you can rest assured you're on the right track. 

Estate planning is one non-investment issue that can cause financial heartache. Many clients think that if they have established a will, they are covered. However, drafting your estate plan documents is merely the first step. Failing to properly maintain and implement the documents can render them useless.

We begin by asking our clients to provide us with copies of their estate planning documents to review and upload to their own client vault. This enables us to identify mistakes and oversights and ensure your estate plan is comprehensive and complete. Having your documents in your client vault makes it easy to maintain and update these important documents over time so that they are ready and available for implementation when needed.

Note: While Provista Wealth Advisors does not provide specific tax or legal advice, our financial planning role in the implementation process is to help clients target potential mistakes and/or oversights that may then be addressed with your estate planning attorney or CPA.

An effective tax planning strategy is crucial to overall financial health, especially as your tax situation changes over your lifetime. Our team has experience partnering with your CPA to ensure you are maximizing your tax strategy. Applying appropriate tax planning strategies during your working and retirement years can help reduce the taxes you could owe.

We view tax planning as an essential part of our commitment to you. We start by analyzing your latest tax return and identifying potential tax-saving methods that are not being implemented. We proactively partner with you and your CPA by integrating tax planning strategies to help you reach your financial goals.

We collaborate with you and your attorney to help identify the risks, vulnerabilities, and benefits of various estate-planning scenarios and work together to create strategies to better protect your legacy.

Roth conversions can be an effective way to balance taxes before and during retirement, but every situation is different. We use Roth conversion strategy analysis as well as partner with your CPA to determine the best course of action for each individual and family. We also identify key income breakpoints for tax planning opportunities like Roth conversions, tax-efficient withdrawals, charitable giving, and much more.

We help business owners in evaluating and determining whether 401ks, ESOPS, SEP, Simple IRAs, or other types of retirement and investment plans are a good fit to help reduce your taxes, plan for the future, and support your employees. Our expert advisors have experience crafting the right plan for your business.

This question can bring a lot of anxiety, but rest assured, we can create a retirement plan to give you peace of mind, no matter where you are on your journey. We can help you understand whether retiring now or in the future, or even looking at a job change or part-time retirement is attainable without worrying you'll run out of money. We do this by utilizing our sophisticated financial planning tools along with our experienced Provista financial planners.

We help you understand what an ideal retirement life looks like for you, from the big picture to the everyday essentials. We start with determining your purpose and mission. Then we help you think through things you'll face in retirement that are often overlooked. From there, we'll incorporate a savings strategy as we develop and implement your financial plan.

Identifying where to get your income is crucial to the longevity of funding your goals. Through our comprehensive financial planning process, we help identify tax-efficient distribution plans for retirement. We identify gaps in your current plan and build a roadmap to generate the income you need to fund your lifestyle.

Too often, clients get an insurance policy—whether it’s whole life, universal life, term life, long term care, disability, home, or auto insurance—and rarely ever review it again.

Life changes, and it can change fast. We believe it’s an important part of the financial process to stay up to date on all insurance policies. The coverage you bought 20 years ago may no longer be enough. Other options available today may be more appropriate for your current situation. 

It’s important to ensure you know how your current policies work, that they are priced right, and that the coverage is appropriate for your situation today. We'll review your policies on a continuing basis to ensure the ones you care about most are protected.

When choosing coverage, most people feel like they are throwing a dart blindly hoping to get the appropriate amount. You may be under-insured or over-insured depending on your needs, but it can be hard to know where you stand. 

Provista will conduct an extensive discovery session to help you understand how insurance can support what matters to you and then determine the specific amount you need based on your personal goals, not general rules of thumb. We can help identify gaps and needs with long-term care insurance, life insurance, key-man insurance, disability insurance, home insurance, auto insurance, umbrella insurance, and more.

All of these circumstances bring emotional and financial instability to you and your loved ones. We have walked alongside many families over the years that have had to deal with these painful situations. Through advance planning and thoughtfulness, our goal is to ensure that when you and your loved ones face these hardships, your finances aren't the concern.