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Financial Planner for Santa Barbara & Los Angeles
Preparing for a confident and satisfied retirement is far more than just investing, as it involves developing an overall plan to meet your specific goals, your lifestyle, and the level of risk you’re comfortable with. One thing is for sure if there is anything that you should take away is financial planning is a thorough process and one that can be considered as putting together an interlocking puzzle, where each piece of the puzzle represents an essential component of your future financial well-being. It combines features like money management, expense limiting, budgeting, saving and investing, insurance, debt lowering and continuous monitoring to generate a steady financial plan.
At Montecito Capital Management, we provide expert financial planning and retirement advisory services to individuals and families in Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, and surrounding areas. Our approach combines fiduciary guidance, active portfolio management, and ongoing plan monitoring to help you navigate life’s transitions, maximize your retirement income, and maintain long-term financial confidence. Whether you are preparing for retirement or already retired, our goal is to ensure that your financial plan aligns with your evolving needs and provides clarity, stability, and peace of mind.
Holistic Financial Wellness: Lifestyle, Retirement & Investments
A complimentary meeting with a financial planner offers a rare opportunity to view your entire financial life through a clear, expert lens. In this personalized session, you can assess your current budget, spending patterns, and investment strategy to ensure each component supports your short- and long-term goals. Together, you and your advisor can identify ways to optimize cash flow, manage debt more efficiently, and align your investments with your lifestyle and retirement plans. This holistic “financial fitness checkup” not only helps you uncover potential risks or missed opportunities but also gives you a tailored roadmap toward greater stability, confidence, and long-term financial success.
Meeting Retirement Goals Through Ongoing Financial Planning
Your investment plan and financial plan should not be static — they need to be periodically reviewed and adjusted. These two key components, your investment returns and current lifestyle costs are intertwined and should be assessed in order to reach your retirement goals. As much as we are fiduciaries for our clients and a resource to them on their investments and financial life, we also frequently serve in a helpful (and supportive) capacity during time of transition-related stress, such as transitioning into retirement, divorce, the death of a spouse or parent or sudden life changes like health concerns.
Active Portfolio Management Near Retirement
Most investment advisors are not portfolio managers. For all intents and purposes, a large body of financial advisors profess the success of a buy-and-hold investment strategy and do not actively manage your assets. However, if you are retired or are near retirement, a well thought out portfolio adjustment plan and sell discipline becomes all the more important. Your nest egg is likely a great source of your retirement livelihood and your financial advisor has based “average annual” returns on much longer time-horizons that are positive for the rest of your retirement – this is complacency management (not active) and is pure speculation. Upon retirement you will likely begin taking income from your retirement portfolio based on your needs and what your adviser believes to be prudent. This “reverse dollar-cost averaging” often occurs when you no longer have the luxury of a long-term investment horizon.
Misleading Market Arguments to Avoid
Investors are often presented with misleading statistics, such as the often-repeated claim: “If you miss the 10 best days of the stock market over 30 years, your returns could turn negative.” While technically accurate, this argument is highly selective. It ignores the other side of the equation: What if you missed the 10 worst days?
Research from JPMorgan and other market studies show that avoiding just the 10 worst days can more than triple the returns of a simple buy-and-hold strategy. Yet both perspectives are inherently flawed. These scenarios assume perfect market timing—something virtually no investor can consistently achieve. Markets often experience their best days immediately following their worst, meaning that being “out” during a downturn often causes investors to miss the rebound as well.
The deeper truth is that the greatest risk in your portfolio isn’t missing a handful of good or bad days- it’s time. As you age, the time available for your investments to recover from losses or compound meaningfully diminishes. This “opportunity decay” becomes especially critical as you approach retirement, when portfolio stability and preservation take precedence over aggressive growth.
In short, rather than focusing on sensationalized market-timing arguments, investors should concentrate on disciplined asset allocation, and a strategy that adapts to their stage of life and risk tolerance.
Implementing Financial & Investment Plans Correctly
We have found that following the delivery of a financial plan* often times many of the recommendations do not get implemented for one reason or another. Sometimes recommendations do get implemented, albeit incorrectly. Financial planning can be extremely complex, and because of the severe negative consequences that can result, it is imperative that certain recommendations get implemented correctly. Many clients retain our firm after the delivery of their financial plan to ensure that our recommendations get implemented correctly and to monitor the appropriateness of their plan in light of changes in the financial markets, tax code or their personal or financial situation.
According to prevailing research, those who plan and control their finances are more than twice as likely to achieve their goals, compared to those who do not. Those who undertake thoughtful planning as a core financial process are more likely to achieve their goals. Effective planning can secure short-term needs but also make a long-term foundation for retirement security, home ownership and wealth accumulation. By budgeting one’s income and expenses, and by investing money, one can grow the capital that will provide for these goals. Changes in the financial situation, interest rates and one’s own personal circumstances must be anticipated. highlighting the importance of treating financial planning as a dynamic, lifelong process rather than a one-time task. Obviously, have a professional financial advisor to guide, monitor and direct can lead to far superior financial outcomes.
Financial planning without ongoing monitoring and adjusting is like running a marathon once and believing that you are going to be in great shape for the rest of your life
Maintaining Financial Fitness
The steps & processes are ongoing:
- Annual updates to your financial plan*
- Close tracking of every detail of your personal financial situation.
- Have a track a budget (we use software, but here is a form: Click Budget Worksheet
- In-depth reports and task list.
- Taking you through the investment process (2–3 meetings to teach you about investing).
- Periodically checking your asset allocation to ensure that it is within the limits.
- Access to Web-based retirement planning tools.
- Implementation of the recommendations within days after engagement.
- Answers to all of your financial planning-related questions.
- Important articles, research and commentary about personal finance via e-mail.
- Projected income sources.
- Social Security — Get estimates of your retirement, disability, and survivors benefits. Additionally, you can use Social Security to get your earnings record and the estimated Social Security and Medicare taxes you’ve paid.
- Pensions — Possible inheritances.
- Retirement scenario calculations to determine if you’re saving enough.
- Value of real estate, personal property, antiques, art, jewelry, gold, collectibles, business interests, etc.
- Annuities (We do not sell annuities but will neutrally evaluate these products & the prospects of 10% yearly withdrawals, etc.)
- Life insurance values, if any.
- Income from investments and retirement funds including stocks, bonds, trusts, real estate.
Retirement Planning Considerations
Determining the timing and location of retirement is among the most significant choices we face in our lives. Alternatively, if you are already in retirement, it is essential to continually evaluate your circumstances and remain prepared to adjust to evolving conditions and your shifting goals. Numerous factors exist in which professionals are ideally suited to assist in charting the optimal path, such as:
- Helping you clarify your retirement objectives (will you still engage in part-time work?).
- Assessing retirement income.
- Analyzing long-term care expenses.
- Taking stock of your assets.
- Understanding your health insurance options.
- Contemplating downsizing your home or moving to a retirement community.
- Formulating a comprehensive plan
Additional Proprietary Financial Resources
We also deliver a series of specialized articles focused on assisting families in planning for education costs, managing household budgets, and securing a stable financial future.
From Planning to Protection: Ensuring Financial Peace Through Estate Strategies
The Essential Guide to Social Security Benefits and Retirement Planning
Strengthen Your Financial Health for a Secure Tomorrow
Retiree Income Portfolios Hit Rough Patch: Why It’s Happening And What To Do
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Disclaimer: The website provides general information regarding our business along with access to additional investment related information. Material presented on this website is believed to be from reliable sources and is meant for informational purposes only. The intent is to provide helpful information, which should NOT be construed as investment advice. We do not guarantee its accuracy, nor completeness, and it is not intended to be the primary basis for investment decisions. We do not make personal investment recommendations to people or entities except to those who have engaged us expressly for the purpose of providing professional investment advisory services. Montecito Capital Management Group’s ADV filing is available online at http://www.adviserinfo.sec.gov and current FORM ADV Part 2, which describes the services offered, fees charged and detailed company information, among other things, is available upon request free of charge. We are limited in our fiduciary capacity by the firm’s non-discretionary client relationship, whereby the client dictates the investment parameters and contractually agrees to accept sole responsibility for their choices