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Step 1: The Initial Call – To get started, simply reach out to us by calling 210-224-1600.
You can also email us or reach out via our Contact Us intake form found in multiple locations on this website. Please feel free to spend time reviewing our site as well. We’ve tried to include information to help people figure out if we’re a good fit based on the services we provide and by describing what our clients look like and the problems we help them solve.
We will schedule a 30-minute introductory phone call to discuss your needs, goals, and how we can assist you. This is where we learn more about your situation and your financial goals. We’ll take a close look at your current strengths, opportunities, and challenges in you reaching those goals. We get a sense of what you’re looking for in a firm, and what kind of help you’ve had in the past. We discuss how you’ve achieved your wealth, and what challenges and concerns keep you up at night and identify what you like and don’t like about your current situation and what your current advisor is doing to protect your future. During this call, we will also provide you with a clear understanding of our services, fees, and answer any further questions you may have. Next, we talk through our meeting process, and what’s required to make it a success. At the end of the call, if we both decide to move forward, we’ll schedule our first meeting. To get you oriented, we send you more background on Kraus Capital, some data-gathering forms and a checklist of info you’ll need to bring to our first meeting.
I’d like to learn more. What comes next?
Here’s what that meeting process looks like:
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Step 2: The Discovery Meeting – (1st Office Meeting) – Brainstorm
We ask a lot of questions and let you do most of the talking. We go over the forms you completed, review your statements and documents, and discuss and prioritize your goals. We identify any income gap and forecast how that is likely to grow during retirement and what it will take to fund it. We’ll test what you are doing now to see if it will work or if it can be improved. We address any questions you have about Kraus Capital, then we schedule our next meeting. This deep dive into your situation helps us establish right up front what is most important to you. You’ll see these insights reflected in your financial/income plan.
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Step 3: Create/Design Our Analysis
This is where the magic happens. We’ll apply decades of experience and academic research to determine:
- Can you afford to retire?
- Can your portfolio be improved?
- Can you eliminate or at least reduce threats to help defend your retirement?
- We’ll stress test your current plans, create a forecast and show areas where you can improve
- Evaluate risk perception, tolerance and capacity for risk
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Step 4: Strategy/Whiteboard Session (2nd Office Meeting)
During this meeting we will explain, in plain English, exactly what you need to do to achieve your financial goals. This is where you will see in dollars and sense, how our firm can help improve your finances.
We shine a bright light on your current financial situation. We will review the various scenarios we tested, discuss tax planning in retirement and present a detailed breakdown that includes these elements:
Net Worth Statement
We go beyond just assets and liabilities. Your net worth statement itemizes your savings and investments, retirement accounts, real estate, life insurance and more. It includes details about account values, beneficiaries, and ownership, too. If you’re like most people, you’ll love seeing all this information pulled together in one concise, comprehensive document.
Retirement Income Plan
We project your cash flow well into your retirement years. Our projection is based on your current and future expected income, taxes, your spending plan, your goals and future aspirations, the projected performance of your current investments, inflation and many more factors, such as whether you’re buying a house or expecting to inherit assets. The plan shows how your finances are likely to look if you stay on exactly the same course you’re on now.
Current Portfolio Analysis
We highlight the strengths and weaknesses of your current investments. We present easy-to-read charts and graphs that illustrate what you own, how diversified you are, how much you’re currently paying in fees, and more. Highlight any problems and what we ‘d charge to fix them.
If we’ve made it this far, chances are we’ll both decide to move forward together. To make it official, you sign our Kraus Capital Asset Management Agreement. We walk you through all the necessary paperwork, the mechanics of the account transfer process and present you with an estimated timeline to accomplish the goals established in your financial plan. You’ve now entered a crystal-clear, confident new era for you and your family. Or you could choose to sleep on it for a few days. If you need more time we’ll typically loop back a week later and see how you’d like to proceed.
Sleep On It
Having been in business for more than 25 years, we are in no rush for you to make a decision. Prior to deciding if we should work together you’ll want to ask yourself:
- Do I like/trust/respect the team at Kraus Capital?
- Do I understand and agree with their investment process and philosophy?
- Do their recommendations make sense to me?
*While we would love the opportunity to work with you, if you decide it’s not a good fit we will wish you all the best. In other words, there is never a hard-sell or pressure to do business with us.
If you are ready:
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STEP 5: Making It Official/Deploy (3rd Office Meeting)
This is where we deliver the results of your comprehensive retirement income plan based on the details we reviewed in our previous meeting. We’ll help you identify any tweaks in your portfolio that need to be made today to have a positive impact on your portfolio down the road. We present you with the fruits of all our analysis, including a detailed, one-page financial plan with specific recommendations and investment strategies. Whenever possible, we identify opportunities to:
- Help plan your retirement
- Build and protect wealth
- Portfolio construction and asset allocation
- Improve your future cash flow
- Retire comfortably or continue enjoying retirement comfortably
- Minimize future tax liabilities
- Protect your assets with the right insurance coverage
- Distribute your assets efficiently with the right estate plan
We lay out our investment strategy and present a recommended portfolio customized to your goals, risk profile, cash flow needs and more. We set up an online vault for secure digital storage and exchange of your important financial documents and provide a secure web portal for important updates, and quarterly reports.
Initial Portfolio Review
After thirty days, we invite you in for a status update. We bring you up to speed on your asset transfers and update your net worth statement with the new accounts. Together, we prioritize your financial planning goals. And we make sure you’re finding everything you need on our online client portal and schedule our next meeting. By using Blueleaf as our integration partner, you’ll be able to access all your accounts in one place.
120 Day Check -In
Our service team will reach out to you by phone to check in and see how things are going and make sure you’ve acclimated to using our systems. We want to make sure you are finding your way around our client portal and that you know where to go to stay up to date on everything going on with your account and at Kraus Capital. We’ll also confirm the timeframe and date of your first formal review and remind you of how happy we are that you chose to work with Kraus Capital.
Continuous Client Care
As often as one to three times per year, we sit down with you to update your plan. We review portfolio performance, risk tolerance and progress on financial planning projects. We discuss any new goals and objectives. And we identify opportunities for the future. Before each meeting, we solicit your input on needs or questions you have and incorporate them into our agenda.
Access to your Kraus Capital team is wide open. Communication is frequent. We’re available to you every day, year-round. Life can get complicated. With Kraus Capital, you have a team of experts to consult with on any topic, any time you need us.
*Please note that we never take custody of the assets. We always use a third-party custodian to execute our trades and produce our client statements. What this means for you is that there will always be a record produced for any transaction.