The 'Family Meeting' Program
Financial Forum professionals use the Family Meeting approach to involve multiple generations of family members in addressing complex personal and financial issues through a collaborative decision-making process.
The programs are designed to provide more intensive consultations and counseling for individual families. Our goal is to act as a resource to the entire family, helping people alleviate the anxiety of uncertain life transitions through a systematic analysis of the financial and legal decisions needed to support aging parents, as well as take care of multiple generations.
The issues include the physical and financial aspects of health care; housing transitions; retirement needs; and legacy planning—not just estate distribution but personal wishes and desires as well.
In particular, we work with families in helping them make decisions about their financial and health care, including:
- What role will various siblings play
- Who will be main person in charge of care
- Who will be the main person in charge of financial matters
- Who will the parent live with, if necessary, and where
- When would you want to go to an adult care facility and what triggers it
- Who has powers of attorney and the health care proxy
In addition to addressing these deeply psychological and emotional decisions, Financial Forum professionals provide concrete financial options to help support, and make possible, the decisions a family makes. Our goal is to fulfill the needs of a family by first, making sure they have sufficient assets, and second, that they're structured in such a way that their financial future is "bullet-proofed":
- From an unexpected illness, with long term care insurance and other options;
- From running out of income, with various guaranteed, inflation-adjusted lifetime income streams;
- By maximizing the balance of assets earmarked for the next generation.
Through the Family Meeting process, parents and children will be able make choices to shape their future—and not wait for others to have to make choices for them.
