Safeguarding Your Wealth with Proper Asset Protection Planning
Protecting accumulated wealth should be a cornerstone of your financial plan. A solid financial plan will address who or what poses the threat of taking away what you have earned and puts measures in place to limit the severity of those threats. These threats are often unseen and not easily predictable and therefore may cause a derailment from the path to your goals if your plan is not properly structured. Do you understand what your plan has put in place for asset protection?
Risk Management
It is not easy to think about, but just imagine that today was your last day alive. Who will be there tomorrow to protect your family and the assets you leave behind? Who will replace the high amount of income that you provide? Will your current savings be enough to provide for the day-to-day basics, let alone the big expenses of the future such as college tuition? Proper planning aims to assess the capital needs of an individual and his or her family to ensure that given any unfortunate event, the family will be taken care of first. A less often considered, but nonetheless important, scenario is disability due to injury or sickness. Will you still be able to pay your mortgage, car loan or other payments? What if this disability is for an extended period of time? You must, again, ask what your financial plan has in place for the future of your family and goals.
Personal and Business Liabilities
For physicians and other highly visible professionals, the possibility of becoming the defendant in a lawsuit based on work performed or expertise given is not out of the question. How is your medical practice structured? Which of your personal assets will be exposed to liabilities? There are particular are strategies to help protect and separate your business assets from your personal assets (Domestic Asset Protection Trusts).
Estate Planning & Titling
Do your estate planning documents match your intentions? Your estate plan may be designed to leave assets to your children; however, if your accounts and assets are not titled properly, your children may not receive those assets as intended. For example, accounts titled as Joint Tenants with Rights of Survivorship, all assets will remain in the account under control of the surviving owner, regardless of the estate plan documents. It is critical that your account titling matches your estate plan documents to avoid unintended consequences.
Mistakes and Unforeseen Problems
Without proper planning, your accumulated wealth could be exposed to numerous risks. With proper planning, those risks can be mitigated. CIG Capital Advisors Wealth Management team can make sure your wealth plan accounts for unforeseen personal events (death, disability or lawsuit) as well as financial hazards that could jeopardize the assets you’ve built over a lifetime. It can take many years, often decades, of hard work to accumulate significant assets. Unfortunately, it can only take one event to erase your progress. Contact a CIG Capital Advisors professional to prepare for the unexpected.
Financial Resiliency Amid Disruption: Your Healthcare Practice
Your medical or dental practice may have to adjust to a “new normal” as states slowly return to broader care permissions after weeks or months of tight, lockdown restrictions. Have you taken advantage of the programs offered to help medical and dental practices survive and what changes can you make to help ensure your practice thrives in a post-lockdown environment?.
Here are some management aspects dentists and physician-owners may want to consider in planning for financial resiliency amid the global disruption brought by the pandemic:
Cash Flow Summary
With so much uncertainty, being able to visualize your cash flows for the next 12 months is crucial. Taking proactive measures to forecast your incoming cash flows will allow you to implement a strategy early on and to timely take appropriate steps. The process includes analyzing your historical revenue stream and collection rates with an objective to forecast your future collections. Reviewing your procedure mix will help you determine what the impact of delaying non-essential procedures will be to your top-line.
Expenses should be adjusted to reflect cost management strategies and cash inflows from government establishments and banking institutions should be factored in to estimate cash balances throughout the pandemic as well as into the recovery period. Conducting a sensitivity analysis may also be beneficial to envision best case/worst case scenarios.
Telehealth
During the COVID-19 crisis, CMS has significantly expanded access to telehealth services for Medicare beneficiaries. This includes the easing of many of the stringent regulations set place by various government entities. Time should be spent reviewing the latest changes, highlighting the different opportunities available to you, and researching different telehealth platforms to see which is most appropriate for your practice.
Due diligence should also be conducted to highlight services that you may virtually perform and bill via telehealth. Disseminating the service to your patients as well as the general public is key to optimizing this tool.
A/R Management
Insurance companies don’t typically pay out as fast as many dental and medical practice managers would like. Understanding tools available to healthcare providers during the crisis could allow you to speed up your collection process. For example, CMS is expanding its payment acceleration program and HHS has announced a provider relief program. Your billing staff may also be utilized to effectuate collections through aggressive A/R management.
Expense Management
Having a handle on your expenses is one key to sustaining a positive cash flow. A first step may be to look into your historical expenses as a percentage of revenue as well as the year-over-year trends. Recent changes should be taken into consideration as well to prudently forecast your budget.
Fixed expenses are typically the biggest threat. However, there may be options available to you depending on the language in your contracts. Review the contracts and agreements you have in place and look for ways to renegotiate with an objective to defer or abate payments. It may be in your best interest to terminate some agreements.
Grant and Loan Opportunities
Keeping businesses up and running is almost just as crucial to owners as it is to the economy. For that reason, there are many grants and loans available to assist you with perfecting your payroll, rent and other costs. Time should be spent pinpointing your situation, reviewing various programs available to you, and working with your financial institution and accountant to pursue loan programs, grants, and line of credits to supplement your cash reserves.
Business Continuity and Recovery Planning
Having a Business Continuity Plan in place is imperative not only to weather crisis times but also to transition back to what many are calling the new normal. This involves reviewing your remote work capabilities, adjusting staff tasks to keep them engaged, increasing oversight of vendors, and other organizational modifications.
Let us help
As experienced medical and dental practice business advisors, we can dig deeper into your numbers and show where you can make changes that will improve your practice’s bottom line. Let us help support your practice’s resiliency by scheduling an initial complimentary consultation with Brian Lasher.