The first step to planning for your financial future is having a solid snapshot of your finances today. That’s why financial advisors always start by asking you to fill out forms, gather all your financial statements and estimate your current savings and spendings. If you’ve managed planning on your own, you likely started building a spreadsheet to track your accounts and calculate estimates. In either scenario, it can be a lot of work. Not to mention, when there are significant changes to your accounts — such as a major purchase or selling off some assets — you either have to reach out to your advisor or rebalance your spreadsheet. In other words, the onus is on you to stay on top of everything.
But what if it could be easier?
Good news: it can be. At Wealthfront we know that you live your life through technology, so setting up and maintaining your financial plan should be an automated process. With our financial planning solution, getting started only takes a couple of clicks. You connect all your financial accounts, and we take it from there. And today we’ve made it even easier to take the first step.
More Breadth
We now helps you better understand which of your accounts are important to connect to help you build the most accurate and personalized financial plan. We cover a wide and diverse set of account types and asset classes — from checking and savings accounts to mortgages to student loans — to ensure we’re capturing your complete portfolio of your assets and liabilities. Even better, you can link to those accounts instantly and securely. No paperwork, no guess work.
Smarter Recommendations
Our automated financial planning is also smart enough to know which accounts might be missing from your dashboard. For example, if you work for a public company, we will suggest that you link your equity compensation account. If you’re married, we will suggest you link your spouse’s Wealthfront account. As you progress through each suggestion and add each of your accounts, your plan becomes more accurate. And because our suggestions are tailored to your situation, you know you’re not wasting time with a pre-formatted list of questions that every client gets with a traditional advisor.
Better Automation
For each account type you link, our advice engine, Path, does some automatic number crunching to project how your future net worth might look and what you might need to spend in retirement. In the near future, we will help you create multiple goals and understand the tradeoffs between each goal type. All of this done with software, in just a few minutes.
Because we’re linking directly to your different financial institutions, your plan updates automatically as your saving and spending behaviors change, as well as when the value of your investments change or when you pay down debt. So our insights will always accurately reflect what’s going on in your life.
The New Frontier of Planning
We’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating: when it comes to financial planning, software is better than people. With our financial planning, you don’t need to pay the high fees of a traditional financial advisor, nor do any of the heavy lifting to get started. We make it easy so you can focus on what’s important: living the life you want.
Disclosure
Nothing in this blog should be construed as tax advice, a solicitation or offer, or recommendation, to buy or sell any security. Financial advisory services are only provided to investors who become Wealthfront Inc. clients pursuant to a written agreement, which investors are urged to read carefully, that is available at www.wealthfront.com. All securities involve risk and may result in some loss. For more information please visit www.wealthfront.com or see our Full Disclosure. While the data Wealthfront uses from third parties is believed to be reliable, Wealthfront does not guarantee the accuracy of the information.
About the author(s)
Dan Carroll is Wealthfront's founder and Chief Strategy Officer. Dan founded Wealthfront to bring client-centric, transparent and low cost financial advice to the retail investor. View all posts by Dan Carroll