A Financial Second Opinion: Is Your Plan Really on Track?

Many investors spend years building retirement savings, managing investments, and making important financial decisions—but how do you know your plan is working as effectively as it could be?

In this episode, Pennsylvania Capital Management Certified Financial Planners Chris Mallon and Andrew Randisi discuss the value of a financial second opinion. Whether you're managing your own investments, working with another advisor, or simply wondering if you're overlooking opportunities, a second opinion can provide clarity and confidence.

The team explains what a comprehensive review includes, the documents that help paint the full financial picture, and how they evaluate areas such as investments, taxes, debt, insurance, retirement planning, and overall financial strategy.

You'll learn:

• Why a second opinion isn't just for people changing advisors 
• What financial strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities advisors look for 
• How taxes, debt, investments, and insurance fit together 
• What information helps create a meaningful review 
• How a second opinion can help confirm you're already on the right path 

If you've ever wondered whether your financial plan could be improved—or simply want reassurance that you're making smart decisions—this episode offers valuable insights into the review process.

Thank you for listening. For more information about how we can help you achieve your financial goals and live a life you love, please visit PCMAdvisors.com.

Transcript

Lesley: [00:00:00] Welcome, everyone, I'm joined by Christopher Malin and Andrew Randisi, both certified financial planners here at Pennsylvania Capital Management. Today we're going to talk about a service that we offer out to anyone actually, and we've been doing it a lot lately, so we thought maybe we would put it in a webinar so that people know that this is something that we do.

It's a free service. It's called a second opinion service. And Andrew, I'll throw it to you to give a little explanation of what we do in this second opinion service. 

Andrew: Sure. Thank you, Lesley. I think there's times in life when it's valid to get a second opinion or is the plan that was presented to me the right plan, and getting another unbiased third party opinion on it.

A lot of us are probably more experienced with getting second opinion when it comes to having major health issues, but also looking at the finances, whether that be if an individual or a prospect is working with a working with a current financial advisor, or they're a do it yourself investor, it's always good [00:01:00] to, especially when the life changes happen having a second set of eyes come in and give a unbiased review of what strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities there are with the current overall plan 

Chris: Yeah, I think I think where it's pretty, mostly valuable, I'd say, is somebody coming in, typically I'd say who's looking for it is maybe a more so a do-it-yourselfer, and they think they're doing everything right.

They have some money saved in retirement accounts, maybe some stuff for the kids. They have insurance box checked, but again, it's a lot of kind of vague uncertainties if these things are, good for them. Maybe they're a little uncertain about what their goals even are we can help organize that too.

And then, yeah, it's really just looking at everything, giving somebody a, "Hey, this looks pretty good." You can just keep heading, going, doing this, or, "Hey, here's," like Andrew said, "some major weaknesses or opportunities," usually opportunities more so than significant weaknesses we see.

And then that's where, we can determine what the next steps are. 

Lesley: Yeah. And important to note too [00:02:00] that no obligation. It-- this is not a sales pitch. We're just saying, "Here's what we see, and we wanna give you this information." Yeah. If you decide after that you do wanna work with us, great, but again, no obligation, no cost, just a chance for you to have another set of eyes take a look at what you're doing.

Chris: Yeah. I'd say a good analogy is having a contractor over to your house to take a look and said, "Okay, I'm thinking about doing this project. Can you give us a quote?" Something like that. They're not-- You don't get billed for somebody to come look at your house and map out what the plan might look like and then, you get...

you pay them for the work. So essentially, it's the review period at the beginning before, even before any pricing can really be determined is let's see what the scope of the project even would be. So that's really good where, it can help. And there's some cases, people come with their stuff.

It's, "Oh, we're working with another advisor. Everything looks fine, it looks good." And if there's not a ton of value for, us to add or doing something differently, maybe something would look a little different, but not enough to necessarily change everything, then, we'll be pretty honest and tell you, "Hey, this is what it'll cost if you do this with us, but everything looks pretty good."

So [00:03:00] it'd be more of a want than a need at that point. 

Lesley: Yeah, can you give me an idea of what they would need to show? Obviously, we'd want to see their brokerage statements, IRAs- maybe tax returns. Is that kind of the general- 

Andrew: Yeah, I would say that's typically a good start of the foundation.

Last month investment custodian statement, the most recent quarterly retirement plan, if the prospect is a active 401k or 403b participant. Definitely want to get at least the current or prior two years of tax returns because really it's the tax return, that's where the devil is in the details of how a client's all many different financial aspects of life are hitting that tax return.

And then typically also what we want to get is a sense of what looks like on the debt picture. Is there any mortgage debt, car loans, credit cards? What does that look like? So we can look at what the kind of putting together will be like a balance sheet. What are the assets? What are the liabilities?

What is your actual equity on your [00:04:00] financial balance sheet? And insurance too is also another facet. We wanna make sure that if there are there are liabilities, what different types of insurance exist or need to exist because those could be potential weaknesses in the plan that need to be addressed.

Chris: Yeah. Thank you, Andrew. Got them all. I'd say like ballpark figure on lifestyle expenses. Doesn't need to be some full broken down budget by any means, but having a sense of, where the dollars are going is always good. Yeah, the more, I'd say the more details that are provided, the more value somebody could get out of the second opinion service, and especially because there's no, no cost up front for us to dive into everything.

And I'd say typical turnaround time on something like that is, what would you say, Andrew? A couple weeks depends we have on more so scheduling than anything else. 

Andrew: Yeah, more or less a week to 10 days or so, as we can kind of-- It's the quicker we get the data, the sooner, the faster we can turn it around.

But I'd say it about a week to ten days typically is what it would take to have, Yeah ... get all the data, [00:05:00] go through it, and see what might be the various up strengths and weaknesses and opportunities for the prospect. 

Lesley: Sounds good. Thank you everybody for joining us. If you do wanna schedule a call with us for the second opinion service, you can go to our website, pcmadvisors.com, or you can always call us.

The main office line is 215 881 7700. Look forward to hearing from you. Take care. 

Andrew: Great. 

Chris: Thanks.