When ‘LIFE’ HAPPENS,
 our real work together BEGINS

Retirement planning that supports your BIG IDEAS and helps you enjoy more of LIFE’S SIMPLE PLEASURES.

From more than two decades of financial planning, investing, and advice, we are convinced of three simple things:

one

Everyone has BIG IDEAS to fund.

You have meaningful, life-long aspirations. Whether retirement, or something else, these need consistent action and a financial plan. We can help with both.

two

Funding starts by AVOIDING MISTAKES.

Our most important work is to help you avoid the Big Mistake: over-reaction to life stress or market conditions during moments that risk impairing long-term plans.

three

SMART PLANNING can help you get there.

Thorough financial planning and thoughtful advice can provide reassurance as you endeavor to enjoy more of life’s simple pleasures. Schedule a call today.

 

“Our greatest value is in creating a plan that supports your goals and

empowers you to stay committed, despite market fluctuations and temporary fears.”


~ Russ Kefauver, Founder

 

Meet the team supporting our Maryville and Knoxville area office

 

Russ Kefauver, AWMA®, CRPC®

Russ Kefauver, AWMA®, CRPC®

Founder and Financial Advisor

Russ is an Accredited Wealth Management Advisor℠ and Chartered Retirement Planning Counselor℠ with over a decade of financial planning experience. He is a member of the Flagship Harbor Advisors network, and also a member of the Financial Planning Association. Russ also proudly supports the Foundation for Financial Planning – which brings free, professional financial advice to wounded veterans, domestic violence survivors and many others. Russ believes that every client needs help realizing their Big Ideas, and that smart financial planning goes a long way toward helping clients enjoy life’s simple pleasures. See our Financial Management and Investment Principles Summary for more insight about Russ’s investment management priorities.

Mandy Kefauver

Mandy Kefauver

Operations Manager

Before coming to work with Kefauver Financial Planning & Wealth Management, Mandy spent over a decade in financial services as a regional account manager. Mandy’s friendly and welcoming personality is eclipsed only by her strong organizational ability.

Jay-Sawyer

Jay Sawyer, CFP®

Financial Advisor

Jay is a Certified Financial Planner™ (CFP ®) professional and Executive Vice President of Flagship Harbor Advisors. As a Certified Financial Planner™ practitioner, Jay follows a strict code of ethics in developing, implementing and monitoring each client’s financial plan and investment strategy. Jay also focuses a significant amount of his time on firm management and development, and fulfills the role of Chief Compliance Officer which includes providing leadership and coaching to the firm’s strong network of independent advisors. Jay graduated from Trinity College in Hartford, CT, with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Economics.

Kelly Starkman

Kelly Starkman

Director of Client Service

Kelly has more than ten years of experience in support positions within the financial services industry. She provides exceptional client support and brings the Kefauver Financial Planning & Wealth Management team her considerable professional administrative skills, and a can-do attitude. She’s an invaluable resource for our clients and the growth of our firm.

About Our Work:

 

The value of our work is helping you live a better life. Success in this regard starts as a meeting of the minds, on its way toward realization. Below are a few things you can expect in our work together.

Before developing an effective financial or investment plan, it’s important to have a complete understanding of financial resources and instruments. We use a Blueprint process that makes it easy to organize your financial life. Your Blueprint will accurately detail your financial resources, quantify your assets, organize information for building a long-term plan, and lay it all out in easy-to-read sections accessible from anywhere if you so desire, with our easy-to-use mobile app.

Starting a journey with a clear destination makes for better trip. We hope to hear about your goals – your Big Ideas – and to provide help as you work toward overcoming challenges to achieving them. We’ll discuss how our work together could best add value to your life.

Risk can work in two directions. Part of our work will help determine if you are taking too much risk, or not enough. We’ll point out and offer insight about personal or employer-based investments – especially if they are unsuitable or inappropriate for you based on your individual or family situation.

Too few advisors make it a point to clearly articulate what you’re charged, how fees can impact your portfolio, and what you get for your money. We’ll discuss these things, and provide an assessment of the fee structure you’re currently in. You can’t get something for nothing, and you DO get what you pay for, but fees can have profound effects on your portfolio over time and deserve attention.

Every financial plan needs execution and management. And each client needs a portfolio of investments that match their goals. That’s the basic outline of our work when it comes to your investment plan. But our work also includes behavioral coaching and advice with your investments, and your money. It’s during times of life stressors or market ups and downs that people become the most vulnerable to The Big Mistake – a poor decision that leaves lasting and unanticipated results. Helping to avoid this is our most important work together. See our Investment Principles Summary for more insight about our investment management priorities.

Financial planning and wealth management is often as much about conservation and protection as it is about growth. We’ll provide insight on strategies and products that can protect you and your family against adversity or unforeseen challenges.

Our work together will take into consideration strategies and tools for preserving wealth that tax and estate planning professionals you work with will find very useful.

*Investing involves risk including loss of principal. No strategy assures success or protects against loss.

What You Can Expect:

STEP 1:

Get a simplified visual of your financial life, for a complete picture of your situation.

Start organizing your financial life today:   

Learning About You

At our first meeting we’ll get to know you and your situation. We’ll ask questions and do a lot of listening. We won’t make long-term recommendations before understanding you, your values, goals, and concerns. We will suggest developing a custom Blueprint – a simplified, organized picture of your financial life.

Create & Manage Your Plan

With a solid understanding of your financial life, we’ll aim to help you build a plan that supports your Big Ideas and helps avoid mistakes. That means careful review and management of current and future investments and financial instruments. We’ll consider future funding needs for enjoying more life; plan for taxes, inflation, health care, and more.

Helping You Stay on Plan

The most important factor in long term success for investors is their own behavior. So you can expect thoughtful guidance in moments when life stress, or market conditions would most often leave you vulnerable to a mistake. We’ll suggest course-corrections when necessary, and staying the course when not.

2 minutes of market and finance from Kefauver Financial


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    Frequently Asked Questions

    Kefauver Financial Planning & Wealth Management works with families and professionals needing serious financial planning and investment assistance for life’s important milestones, such as the approach to, and time in, retirement.

    Below are important questions to consider before working with us, and answers that should help determine a good fit – an important first step.

    Let us answer with a story. Back in 1957, when Warren Buffett was just starting out, he was referred to a wealthy family in Omaha named Davis. This would be the first really important client he would have outside his family, and so he met with them, made his presentation, and left – and the Davises didn’t know what to make of him. He was 27, kind of odd-looking, and the family just kept talking back and forth. They couldn’t decide what to do. And then Mrs. Davis spoke up, and she just said, “I like everything about that young man”. And that was that. It may not seem very scientific, but that is the way WE like to get chosen – or not at all.

    Our commitment to the clients who choose to work with us is simple: We’re going to care more about you, and be more personally devoted to your financial success, than anyone in the world who doesn’t share your last name. If somebody else is cheaper, or somebody else puts up better numbers for a year or two, well, we just don’t think that stuff matters very much in the long run.

    The right advisor for you is the one you and your family trust the most, and have the most personal faith in. The very best advice we can give you, from the heart, is this: choose your advisor the way the Davis family decided to hire Warren Buffett.

    We don’t accept accounts on that basis. We would expect to be responsible for the entire portfolio or none at all. That may seem harsh, but it’s borne of concern for your best interests. We don’t think it smart for you and your family to use two financial advisors. Here’s why:

    You’ll get the best real-life return by making a comprehensive plan with one advisor you implicitly trust. Then, in building and managing a portfolio with that person in a manner that carries the plan forward in a coherent and concentrated way.

    With portfolios from two or more advisors, you risk gaps, redundancies, poor guidance, quite possibly fee inefficiencies, and just general cross-purpose miscommunication. Worse, it clouds judgement by risking comparisons over who gets the higher return over a year or two or three, which is too random, and no way to build a smart plan. Our advice? Pick the advisor whom your head and your heart tell you will be the most personally committed to your financial success, and entrust them with the whole assignment.

    It’s likely that in reading this, you are concerned about retirement and funding your life with money dedicated to that purpose. For most people, it’s life’s biggest goal. But without a plan, meeting your goals becomes random and prone to setbacks or poor guidance.

    For example, we won’t know how much of your money is dedicated for retirement, or for other purposes. We won’t know how long you have until retirement, or until you need funds for the other goals you’re preparing for. And we won’t know how much or little you may be able to add to your assets between now and then. Most of all, we won’t know how much income you’ll need your portfolio to provide in order to fund those goals – especially if that includes providing funding when you stop working – such that you can maintain your lifestyle, dignity, and independence.

    We simply would not know what to recommend until we’ve worked through a financial plan together – one tailored just for you.

    That may be a valid comparison, if advice were a commodity. But that isn’t a valid comparison.

    Advice is the un-commodity. Like the acumen of advisors themselves, advice varies widely in quality. For example, most advisors continue to render investment advice based on market prognostication, and with “educated guesses” as to which investments will outperform. This is an approach we believe is thoroughly discredited, and which invariably leads to substandard returns.

    We would encourage you to think back to a time you received great advice in your life… maybe it came from your father or mother, family, friend, or trusted colleague. It’s likely this advice was priceless to you, and worth more than advice you may have gotten anywhere else.

    Financial advice is very similar. Good advice isn’t always easy to find. We should seek it out before we need it, and value it once it’s found. It proves its mettle during, and in spite of, critical and vulnerable life moments, and improves long-term, real-life outcomes well beyond its cost.

    If you’re not completely convinced of that, let us advise you, as strongly and sincerely as we can: Go with the broker, online service, or bank that is cheapest.

    We don’t, and neither does anyone else.

    Investment ratings are essentially backward looking, because that’s all they can be. There’s no reliable way of projecting future performance from past performance.

    Moreover, the nature of the cycle is that sectors and styles that have outperformed in the last several years will often be the underperformers of the next block of time. What we can certainly do is make sure you’re in the right kinds of investments, given your long-term goals and your ability to handle market volatility. We would urge you to be terribly careful of any advisor who says they can do much more than that.

    We don’t know that with any consistency, and I’m happy to report that no one else does either.

    It’s not important and thank goodness it isn’t, because nobody can do it. Read almost any of Warren Buffett’s annual reports, and he’ll proudly tell you he can’t time the market, and never tries.

    Twenty years ago the market was at a fraction of where it is now; thirty years ago it was at an even smaller fraction of where it is now. That doesn’t even include the dividends it’s paid. For folks who are still saving for retirement and for those who are already in retirement and may need to live on their investment for upwards of 30 years, THAT is what’s really important.

    It’s not that you can’t try to time the market; it’s that you don’t need to.

    We help our clients work toward long-term financial objectives with a goal-focused and planning-driven approach. Attempts to outguess the economy or the markets are futile and short-sighted. We are convinced that successful investing involves consistent progress toward your life-long goals within the framework of a plan, and that unsuccessful investing comes from over-reacting to life stressors or momentary market conditions, leading to The Big Mistake.

    Here’s what that means: At critical market junctures, doing nothing is often the most important thing you can do. And yet it’s almost impossible for most people to accomplish. You need a really outstanding advisor to convince you to do nothing when it really counts.

    When markets are rising spectacularly, people naturally want to concentrate into the one or two hot sectors producing spectacular returns. But inside every tortoise, there’s a hare struggling to get out, so we discourage sector-hopping, and fad-chasing. During those moments, we’ll say: “You have a beautifully diversified portfolio, ideally suited to your most important long term goals. It’s a fad in a passing moment. Don’t put your plan at risk. Do nothing.” And of course, sooner or later, doing nothing turns out to be the one right move to make.

    The same is true, and perhaps even more so, in the late stages of bear markets. Many clients will want to get completely out of stocks and move into cash alternatives. Our advice is the same – “You have a beautifully diversified portfolio, ideally suited to your most important goals. The sky is not falling. This time is not different. Do nothing.”

    *Investing involves risk including loss of principal. No strategy insures success or protects against loss.

    Are you a fiduciary?

    What does that even mean? It's an important distinction.

    Kefauver Financial Fiduciary Oath
    Learn more about the Fiduciary Standard here.

    We act under the Fiduciary Standard as a Registered Investment Advisor. Our Fiduciary Oath is freely available here.

     

    Get in Touch With Us:

    Let’s talk – in person, on the phone, or online – we’re here to help.

    Call Us: (865) 268-9585


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    Kefauver Financial Planning & Wealth Management, Maryville & Knoxville, TN

     

    Life doesn’t end at five o’clock.
    We’re accessible and alive after five.

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      Kefauver Financial Planning & Wealth Management

      1020 William Blount Dr.
      Maryville, TN 37801

      Kefauver Financial Planning & Wealth Management, Maryville, TN

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