Frequently Asked Questions

The relationships we have with our clients are more of a collaborative partnership than a transaction.

Our clients stay with us for decades which is why it's so important that we choose our clients very carefully. We know it's better to not accept a client relationship than to accept one that is not a good fit.

There, the relationship has to be financially beneficial for both of us.

This means that you have to have a higher benefit than what we charge and at the same time we have to charge enough to benefit our highly talented and caring team.

Each service has a different type of charge

Financial Planning is a one time fee and you can sign up for a monthly subscription service to be in our advice community.

Asset Management is a percentage of assets

Tax Preparation is quoted by the type of return

Trusts are a flat fee depending on the type of trust

Asset Protection design and implementation with trusts and LLC's is quoted on the design and complexity

Tax Planning is different for personal and business planning but is generally charged on a flat fee based on revenues

Business Valuation is based on the size of your business

Business Exit Strategy is based on the size and design of your business

Insurance consulting can be either by fee or by commission and you can decide how we work with you

We offer a 100% guarantee of satisfaction. If you employ us to perform a service and are not happy with it we will refund our fees.

Exclusions:

1) When we pay a fee to the IRS for a private letter ruling, an exclusion or for certain types of filing or to a state for service to set up a LLC or other type of entity. We will refund our fees for service but cannot refund the fees paid to the state or IRS.

2) Asset Management Fees. Fees are billed on a quarterly basis and once we have completed the quarter we are not permitted to refund fees in arrears. Please see our SEC Federal Filing called the ADV Part II

3) Refunds must be made in writing no later than 60 days after the engagement. We may be paying outside legal council, CPAs, appraisers, actuaries or other professionals out of the fees you pay us and our agreements with them to recover what we pay them are under a 60 day agreement.

If you are a client you have Platinum Access. You will be given a private email and will have a priority access phone number to your team.

If you are not yet a client we will provide you with a group email as well as a support group to ask questions.

Our meetings are usually held by Zoom but if you live near one of our physical offices you can schedule a time to meet.

We do not take walk-ins. If you are having your tax returns prepared, please do not drop off your tax source documents at our office without an appointment.

Please do not send anything private or personal through email.

EMAIL IS NOT SECURE.

If you have anything private or personal please use one of our secure upload options

For Tax preparation please use the Intuit Link sent to you

For Tax planning, please use the Tax planning form https://www.hhfcplanning.com/widget/form/uBcg2FJvF59mwsENge03

For Business Valuation, please use the Emoney Vault link provided to you with your engagement agreement

For Accounting clean up, please use the Intuit Link provided to you

For Insurance or Annuity Review, please use your Emoney Vault link

For Trust or Asset Protection Review, please use your Emoney Vault link

Emoney is our main access point for clients. Once you have received your Emoney link, please use Emoney for everything except for Tax Preparation Source Documents

Tax Preparation - each year our Intuit Software will provide a new upload link. This is provided to you upon engagement for tax preparation.

Tax Planning is a single link to upload past tax returns. https://www.hhfcplanning.com/widget/form/uBcg2FJvF59mwsENge03

If you have an issue with your links or log-ins please contact us at [email protected]

For custodians that we work with such as Schwab, Interactive Brokers or Alltruist - we may be able to do a password reset but you may need to call the company directly for security protocol verification for access.

Insurance companies may offer you a separate log in. You can contact us first to see if it's a password but we may request you call the company directly if it requires a security verification for any changes.

It depends on whether you are employing us to prepare your taxes or to perform a tax plan.

For Tax Plans, use this link. https://www.hhfcplanning.com/widget/form/uBcg2FJvF59mwsENge03

For Tax Preparation - you will be provided with a new link each tax year

We sincerely appreciate your trust in us and your referrals.

Over 75% of all our new clients come from existing clients have been referred by current clients.

We do have a very stringent process to accepting clients however and we would never want to upset a referral by not letting them into our firm.

Here is our criteria.

1) They are kind and would be kind to our team.

2) They want to collaborate or delegate. They are looking for a relationship to help them get to their goals

Please don't worry about if they have enough assets or income to work with us, that's our job. We will gladly meet with them and do a cost benefit analysis. If we find that we cannot benefit them more than our fees, we won't take them on as a client but will strive to refer them to other firms or professionals that might be able to help them.

Our process is very different than other firms. We don't have any track, or agenda.

We act as fiduciaries and will not perform any "sales pitch" of the latest or popular products or services.

Every client is different and therefore we seek your desired outcome to determine where we go next.

We do however have a process that we follow to assure that we are accepting the right clients and relationships.

Step 1. We first meet with you and discover your situation and what your goals are. Then we may gather data such as tax returns, investment statements, current trusts or LLCs, and insurance policies. We need this hard data to perform the calculations to give you accurate information.

Step 2. Once we understand where you want to go we develop a "GAP Analysis".

This analysis allows us both to see where you are compared to where you want to be.

Step 3. Once we understand the GAP, then we perform a CBA (Cost Benefit Analysis). This allows us to assure that you will benefit more than what we charge.

Step 4. A decision is made to offer you a place within our client roster or to refer you to another firm that may better help you based on your specific needs.

We meet with clients by Zoom but do have an option to meet in person if you live near one of our physical offices.

After Covid most clients have adopted a virtual meeting and have never looked back. After dealing with traffic, parking, elevators and waiting rooms - virtual meetings are safer, more efficient and saves a lot of time.

We have also adopted a talent first of location first team process.

Pre-pandemic we had to find the talent that was close to a physical office and that prevented us from finding the best talent.

With remote work, we are now able to not only hire better talent but bring in multiple people into a Zoom meeting at one time no matter where they are.

For 99% of our clients, we connect by Zoom. If for any reason you have not adopted this new method of connecting please let us know. We can walk you through the set up and show you how it works.

We have worked with clients and vendors in all 50 states, as well as Europe, South America, Central America and Australia and have not had any issues.

It depends on which service we are helping you with.

Asset Management. We submit our billing to the custodian you are using (Schwab, Interactive Brokers or Alltruist) and they will deduct our agreed upon fee each quarter. Your fee is based on the service level and the amount we are managing.

All other services. (Tax Preparation, Tax Planning, Legal Documents, Business Services, Financial Planning, or hourly consulting)

We will send you an invoice through email that you can pay with a credit card or by checking account ACH.

We do not accept cash or checks as this would increase our costs to process which would increase your cost.

The Pandemic forced us to learn that that the old way of operating needed to be changed.

During Covid we had team members that got sick as well as did not respond well to the new work environment during that time.

In the Summer of 2020 we pivoted to a Team Only approach to protect our clients continuity in service.

Instead of the old method of having one advisor, or CPA we created teams. A team contains three one to one people and multiple one to many people

Each client is assigned to one team. You always have the ability to switch teams if you are finding that your personality may better match with another team. If you are finding this please reach out to to discuss as our end goal is to give you a better and happier future. That starts with a great collaboration with open and trusting communications. If you are not feeling this, then you deserve to find another team that may have a better culture fit with you.

A One to One Team Member is a Relationship Manager, a Financial Planners Assistant and the Lead Strategic Planner

A One to Many Team Member can be a trust officer, an insurance agent, a lawyer, a document preparation assistant, a CPA, payroll clerk or business advisor. Additionally, if you have employed us to perform payroll services or accounting, you may be working with multiple accountants or payroll clerks within our firm.

We offer every new potential relationship a Discovery Meeting. This allows you to interview us and for us to see if you are a good fit for our firm. During this meeting we will review with you what we think we can help you with and we may be able to help you with our fees. In more complex cases we will gather some basic information and schedule another meeting to present a cost benefit analysis. This gives us the ability to really know if the relationship will be a mutually financial benefit for both parties.

While we do believe that having a coordinated team that all work together, we also realize that some long term relationships are hard to break. If you have a professional that wants to work with you and within our planning, by all means please keep the relationship.

We are happy to work with any of your current advisors.

However, we have learned that most of what we do with clients is far advanced past what most advisors have been educated on.

Therefore we break our outside communications into two scenarios.

Scenario I - We work with your other advisors as long as they are educated on their own on our techniques, tax strategies or asset protection programs. If we do not have to explain or educate your other advisors, then we are happy to work with them.

Scenario II - We work with your other advisors but find they are not educated and they want us to explain our techniques, tax strategies or asset protection programs.

If we have to educate your other advisors by providing IRS codes or cases, or provide technical support we have to charge you for this time.

This policy has been in place since 2010 where our advisors came to the realization that they were educating other advisors for free.

If we find this situation we will first contact you and explain the situation and if you would still like us to educate your advisors we will request a retain from you and bill against that retrain hourly for educating your other advisors.