Services

Managing your Family and Your Finances

Financial Forums offers a variety of programs and services, tailored to the specific needs of corporations, professional organizations and consumers.

Corporate/Industry Group Programs

These comprehensive programs and consulting services are designed for the benefit of company employees, addressing a critical set of financial and interpersonal issues that affect every family. The program covers difficult multigenerational challenges people face as their families age--especially at a time when we're all living longer--and subsequently require more financial resources to live well. The key areas include the management of complex family dynamics involved in caring for aging parents, resolving conflicts among siblings while meeting the needs and desires of multiple generations. In addition, it provides a palette of financial and legal tools to support the resolution of these issues: strategic approaches and financial planning for health care, housing, insurance, retirement and inheritance needs.

The program goal is to provide employees with a strong support system, financial literacy, and several new approaches and ideas that could help resolve personal and family issues that often take time away from work and hinder their productivity. The consulting team managing this "one-stop" multigenerational service consists of an expert in family and aging issues; an elder-law attorney; financial planner, long-term care insurance expert; and a health/elder care manager. The program includes presentations and consultations with large and small groups of employees, as well as individual consultations with employees and their families as needed.

Public Programs for Consumer Markets

These financial literacy programs are offered as seminars, workshops and conferences to the public at large, in partnership with other corporate sponsors. Like Financial Forum corporate programs, these 1/2-day venues offer attendees valuable advice and expertise provided by panels of experts in family and aging issues, elder care, financial management and estate planning. A range of topics focus on interrelated family and financial issues that affect multiple generations--and how people can create a systematic plan of family meetings to management of these issues.

Succession Planning for Family Business Owners

Financial Forums, Inc., in strategic partnership with Corporate Performance Consultants, is focused to meet the unique needs of family-owned businesses. The program assures the future growth of the company while managing the financial and emotional needs of multiple generations and preserving family relationships. We offer a more comprehensive plan for transitioning from business into retirement and ensure assets earmarked for the next generation are maximized, and the need to make critical decision in the midst of a crisis is eliminated.Click to Download the Family Business Brochure

Financial Literacy for Youth/Young Adults

Literacy for Life

These financial literacy programs are designed for groups of youths and young adults in high schools, colleges and family-oriented organizations such as religious groups or country clubs. The programs are tailored to meet the needs of individual organizations, varying from multi-session courses for youths to single overview programs for parents of youth. Topics include setting up budgets, money management and savings plans; creating financial strategies and goals; establishing good credit and repairing poor credit; avoiding consumer scams; and talking with your family about money.

Financial Literacy for Families

Financial literacy, as Mark Twain might have said, is a little like the weather: Everybody talks about it, but nobody does anything about it.....Until now.

The "Financial Literacy for Families Program," created by Financial Forums, Inc, is designed to provide children--together with their parents--an overview of the basic, practical skills needed to assure a family's healthy financial future. These skills are critical to our kids' success, yet no one is systematically teaching them. Is it any surprise that our families are swimming in debt and our economy is swamped with foreclosures?

     A parent’s work is never done but at no time is it more crucial than when a graduating high school senior leaves to attend college. Never is he or she more vulnerable, nor more in need of parental guidance, than when it comes to knowing how to spot the various hidden fees on their purchases, be it through a check, credit or debit cards, and, in particular, ATM machines. How can we instill financial independence even though were paying their bills? How can we make them responsible financially and teach them some important values about money that will be important to them? Many believe that providing this information to teenagers is an integral part of raising an independent,functional young adult that knows you cant spend more than you have

This interactive, two-hour program covers the above and more in 7 key segments:

•    Talking about money and values with your family , the cycle of money coming in and out
•    Creating financial management strategies including budgets and goals ours and theirs
•    Teaching Kids about credit ,debit cards and ATM’s at the bank as well as online
•    Learning about saving and investment options and strategies online and at the bank
•    Understanding the importance of establishing and maintaining good credit
•    Avoiding consumer scams and other financial pitfalls such as hidden fees
•    Understanding home ownership, mortgages, Insurance in our long range planning.

The program can also be expanded to multi-session courses to meet the needs of various organizations and audiences, including high schools, colleges,religious organizations, nonprofit and civic groups. But the essential theme is that we strive to connect kids with their parents, promoting communication, education and practical knowledge about a subject many families have difficulty talking about -money and achieving functional independence from ones Parents.

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.