Investing 101: Best Investment Blogs for Beginners

What is a fiduciary?

When selecting a Financial Advisor, it’s important to know they will be looking out for you and the money you worked hard for all your life. Not all financial advisors are the same. When considering a financial advisor to partner with, it’s important to know if they are fiduciaries, meaning they will be ethically obligated to work in your best interests to help you reach your goals.

Why choose Trilogy?

At Trilogy, we operate by suitability standards in offering advice and recommendations that are the most suitable to your needs. We aren’t just salesmen looking to sell products that earn the highest commission. We are dedicated Advisors, financial life planners, who use our expertise to guide you to make smart money decisions. We recommend investments and financial products that are the best fit for your life situation.

Trilogy Capital Inc. is a Registered Investment Advisor. We are a fee-based firm. That means some of our Advisors earn commissions from the sales of certain insurance or securities products. While this incentivizes our Advisors to be the best they can be at their job, be assured that they put people first to select the best solutions for you.

You have a team behind you

When you work with Trilogy, you don’t just have just one Advisor, you have a team who have an ethical duty to recommend what’s best for you. We are specialists with decades of experience in wealth management and protection.

Life planning

With our Advisors, you can be sure they have a fiduciary duty of care to work at the highest level of trust in creating and reviewing your Life Plan. When they make a recommendation, it’s because they feel strongly it’s the right fit for you and your needs, in the life stage you are now and for the future.

Investing for your future

Our financial professionals work in a fiduciary capacity with our investment platforms. We value our relationship with you and work to maintain your trust. We look at the big picture and consider all aspects of your life regarding your personal financial situation.

We know managing your finances can be a full-time job. That’s why our Advisors are there for you to ensure your investments are properly diversified for your risk tolerance. We also monitor other service providers working on components of your plan (including investment companies, record keepers and third-party administrators) to make sure they are catering to your needs and in a cost-efficient manner.

Managing risk

Your fiduciary Financial Advisor will review your personal situation to determine where the risk factors are when it comes to protecting your wealth and recommend insurance products that best fit your needs to add peace-of-mind protection. Whether it’s long term care or life insurance – we’re here to set you up for success so you have a solid plan for whatever comes your way in life.

In keeping with our fiduciary commitment to you, we are an independent financial planning firm. That means we don’t own any insurance products. We’ve done the legwork to find reputable insurance companies who have a proven track record of financial security and claims-paying ability, so you can be confident we recommend products that have the credibility you can count on.

A partner you can trust

When you work with Trilogy, you can finally take a breath in knowing you have a partner who will look out for your finances and do what is best for your life situation and help you meet your financial goals. You can get on with enjoying life, not worrying if you have the money to cover it.

Here’s a tip: Review your spending habits. It's really hard to mitigate or manage financial anxiety if you don't have a clear sense of your spending.

When talking with clients, questions that come up all the time are “Where's my money going? I don't know where all of our dollars go, we’re making a good income, but I don't know where it's going?”. To get cash flow will start answering that question. It will start reducing the anxiety in those particulars because we can't continue this path of “how do I fix this?”. That's what we do as Advisors – we train, and we help people fix and solve those particular problems. I always ask this question, where's my money going? But more importantly, is your money in sync with your financial why? And your financial why is customized, it's, what do you want it to be? And that could be financial independence.

I can tell you in the course of my 30 plus years I’ve sat down with many couples, individuals, and businesses and I've said, “Hey, congratulations, you now have financial independence”. In other words, you don't have to go to work anymore, work is now an option. You can still choose to go to work – you could change jobs, you can do whatever, but you don't need to anymore. You've built up enough that you can replace the income, enjoy the lifestyle that you want to enjoy, spend the time with family, friends, and loved ones that you want to do. And that comes from good planning on the front end and understanding that you can get there much faster if you work with a coach or work with an advisor and understand your cash flow.

It will be liberating once you go through that process, but it does require taking action. Here's some take actions on what you can do. There are the knowns and the unknowns.

In the knowns, we control whether we want to have a plan or not, we control whether we want to do cash flow and budget analysis, we control that reduction. If that's really your number one goal is to get debt-free well, then let's build a plan that makes you debt-free. We control how much is in our emergency fund; so that if we lose a job or income drops, maybe we've got adjustable income or we want to change jobs, we've got this money set aside so we don't have anxiety during that period. We control all those things. We control how much protection we have against risks; you know how much life insurance that we have if we have state documents that are there those are all known things. Now, here's an unknown, you don't what day you will leave this world. Do you have plans in place that make sure that loved ones are protected the way you'd like them protected? Again, you control these areas, these are all things that are in your control.

The one thing I'll say is even though we don't have control over the unknown, we always want to stay informed, especially around new laws and new rules. This is what Advisors do for a living. For instance, if you take money out and the market's down or maybe you took it out and it's taxable- now it bumped your taxes up.  It’s important to meet with your Advisor and to have a coach to help interpret these known rules that are probably unknown to most Americans.  It's probable these types of things will come up and once you pick a strategy, whatever that strategy is, you can't change it.

But you have to always ask yourself “Maybe this impacts me, and if I don't know about it, I'm not going to do anything prudent to help myself get on to financial independence”. If you do know about it and your Advisor knows about it, they're going to help you make good decisions that will work well for you in those areas. It's important to understand that there are unknowns out there, and you can plan your best for those unknowns, but it's important to accept that you never have full control of the unknown. So. think about what you do have control of, and make sure that you are making the best decisions for yourself, your family and your loved ones.