The document summarizes the approach of Wealthcare for Women, an alternative to traditional financial advising. It argues traditional advisors rely on questionnaires, computer models, and risk-focused investing rather than understanding clients' goals. Wealthcare instead focuses on personalized conversations to understand clients' values and build customized plans balancing goals, lifestyle, savings, and risk. The approach aims to empower women clients and help them achieve their dreams while enjoying life today through an ongoing partnership rather than one-time meetings or computer-driven recommendations.

1. Wealthcare for Women™
Take control of your financial future. Join Wealthcare for Women.
Russ Thornton

2. The traditional financial services approach is broken.
It’s kept alive by fear – the fear that what you’re doing now isn’t enough to take care of you and your family in the future.
That fear -- fanned by financial advisors peddling traditional investment-focused financial advice -- drives a mentality of excessive sacrifice, compromising your life today. It leads to unwarranted investment risk in search of bigger returns.
Instead of focusing on you and your goals, this failed approach relies on a gambling approach to the stock market. In this scenario, you can only hope your financial advisor makes the right bet.
Ultimately, an approach that promises to help you achieve your life goals but that actually delivers fear, anxiety and discomfort, is clearly broken.
THE PROBLEM:
Traditional financial advisors reduce your financial future to a game of numbers.
THE SOLUTION:
Wealthcare for Women™ puts you
back in control.

3. Traditional Financial Advisors
vs.
Wealthcare for Women™
The ‘best practices’ of traditional financial advisors is underpinned by a series of core premises.
Wealthcare for Women™ questions the validity of each of these premises and proposes an alternative process grounded in the principle of partnering with you, the independent woman, to put your needs first.
Traditional Financial Advisors
Wealthcare for Women™
Where to begin?
The traditional financial services model spits out a lengthy questionnaire for you to fill out, then feeds those fixed data points into a computer. The computer formulates your plan and projections.
The Wealthcare for Women™ approach puts you first. I invite you to participate in a conversation - not an interrogation -around your goals and dreams and use that to build a personalized master financial plan.
What is important?
The computer models rank goals by priority, discarding one goal after another as the simulation determines the optimal scenario.
I offer a range of options based on your “ideal” and “acceptable” goals so that you can balance the competing life and financial priorities to make reasonable value judgments as to what is ultimately important to you.

4. Traditional Advisors
Wealthcare for Women™
What role does risk play in your portfolio?
As much as your multiple choice risk tolerance profile questionnaire -- calculated by the computer -- indicates.
The first step is to evaluate the role of risk in relationship to your goals. We’ll discuss the need for risk relative to goals and together we’ll decide the best course based on your level of comfort.
What’s the best way to deal with shortfalls in target retirement income?
The most important priority in retirement planning is to maximize savings above all other goals. It’s better to sacrifice lifestyle and family goals now to ensure you have more than sufficient funds in retirement.
By partnering with you to examine all the options in relationship to your values. I strive to help you find a balance between your lifestyle and the needs of your family now and the long- term goals you want to achieve.
How do we measure your success?
Report on your past investment results, relative to the market, using complicated statistics and industry jargon.
Explain how your investment performance relates to the goals established in your financial plan, which is based on your life. I help you understand how your overall financial plan is performing based on your stated goals.
How do we stay on track?
Update computer calculations annually, at most. Focus on a limited number of strategic adjustment options, including increasing risk, increasing savings, discarding goals.
Communicate regularly and respond to changes in your financial and personal situation and market and economic conditions by adjusting the balance of your goals and priorities. I inspire confidence in your wealth strategy by educating and partnering with you.

5. Does this sound familiar?
You’re scheduled to meet with your new financial advisor this week. You’re trudging through a 23-page questionnaire that seems like an interrogation. You’re feeling rebellious because not much of the questionnaire, if any, seems relevant to your life today. You’re looking through piles of papers trying to find out what your car insurance premium was last year while you’re wondering what that has to do with your life goals and dreams. And honestly, how are you supposed to know what your goal retirement age is? Isn’t that what the financial advisor is supposed to help you figure out?
Now you’re in sitting at a desk in front of your advisor, who produces a report based on those data points from the questionnaire you filled out and declares that your financial plan is set before you’ve even opened your mouth to talk about your goals and dreams. The computer running the financial planning software has calculated a low probability of you achieving your goals from the questionnaire, so lower priority desires, like gifts to help your children or grandchildren and your annual travel budget, are eliminated completely.
The computer has decided, based on your risk tolerance questionnaire, that your risk profile is “moderate.” Therefore, the advisor recommends the highest returning – read risky – investment portfolio in that bracket. This means, by the way, that you need to save a minimum of $15,000 a year.
But just to be on the safe side, in case the market doesn’t return what the computer program projects, the advisor declares that your savings level should be bumped up to $18,000 because you can’t save too much. And by that point, you are sitting there with your mouth open because you literally haven’t had a chance to get a word in edgewise. You thought this was supposed to be a conversation, the start of a partnership with someone who understood your goals and aspirations and the financial needs and concerns of an independent woman such as yourself.
The Path to Comfort and Confidence
Wealthcare For Women™ began by questioning the status quo:
• Is this working?
• Is the system delivering what it promises?
• Is there a better way?
Wealthcare for Women™ believes the status quo is broken. That’s because most financial advisors fail to deliver on their stated promises. Those promises are to empower women to achieve – with ease and confidence – the goals they value.
Wealthcare for Women™ upends the traditional approach by viewing the delivery of financial advice through the lens of the independent woman and her goals and needs for financial security for herself and her family.

6. Twelve months go by.
You return for an annual review. Surprise – although your portfolio “beat the market,” it hasn’t achieved the growth the computer and your advisor initially projected. The advisor recommends an adjusted strategy and pulls out a variety of technical statistics and simulated scenarios to support it. You sign on, but still aren’t sure what any of this has to do with your goals and dreams and how you want to make use of your wealth to help your family and live a comfortable life now and in retirement.
Is this working for you?
Probably not. But if you question the process or the results, including:
• The lack of a true partnership with your advisor,
• The superficial discussions that skirt any meaningful conversation about your goals, dreams and hopes for yourself, your family and your future,
• The pressure to take more risk and sacrifice more to ‘stay ahead of the game,’
• The focus and near obsession on the near indecipherable technical jargon and statistical modeling at the expense of a relationship with you, or
• The tedious gathering of data for no apparent useful purpose,
you are told “to leave it in our hands” - a typical response to women clients, but one that does not increase your confidence in that advisor.
Unfortunately, this experience is replicated in the offices of thousands of financial advisors, with you paying for the privilege of not being listened to or understood. You aren’t alone in finding this a disempowering, uncomfortable, uncertain and stressful process.

7. It’s not you who doesn’t get the system, it’s the system that doesn’t get you.
The traditional financial services approach is built around certain fixed assumptions about what you – an independent woman –want and the best method to deliver those results to you.
The problem is the system literally cannot accommodate someone who does not fit within these assumptions. And that’s you because if you’re like most independent women, you want a long-term partnership with an advisor who understands your concerns and integrates them into a coherent, comprehensive financial plan that is personalized to you, your values and your priorities. You don’t want to take on unnecessary risk; instead, you want to have the ability to enjoy your life today while building the necessary resources to take care of yourself and your family in the years ahead.
The system doesn’t get you, but you don’t seem to have any alternatives.
But this is the approach endorsed by the experts. These are industry-adopted best practices based on Nobel Prize winning theories. From within this bubble of certitude – and not a little bit of arrogance – it’s difficult for advisors and clients alike to imagine anything different.
It’s the status quo and it isn’t likely to change despite the fact that it doesn’t come close to meeting your needs.
What does it take to change the status quo?
It takes active inquiry to recognize the faulty assumptions inherent in the traditional financial advice approach and how it is executed by individual financial advisors.
It takes conviction to push back against the conventional wisdom of an entire industry.
It takes willingness to listen to what women really want and to imagine a new approach that puts their needs first.
That is exactly the approach I take at Wealthcare for Women™.

8. Wealthcare for Women™
Wealthcare for Women™ is about helping you live your life today, as intentionally and joyfully as possible, while being comfortably and confidently prepared for an uncertain future.
Wealthcare operates from the premise that you want to define what success means to you – not have someone else’s definition put on you – and to determine your own unique life goals based on where you are today and your dreams for the future.
Wealthcare helps you achieve the goals that are most important to you based on the following beliefs:
• You want to enjoy your life today as much as possible without living in fear about the future
• You want to be financially independent as soon as possible
• You want to take as little investment risk as possible
These beliefs aren’t the end of a conversation -- they are just the beginning. They are an integral part of the Wealthcare for Women™ process, the conversations I have with my clients every day that help the independent women I work with evaluate and adjust their personal approach to balance their choices and priorities and the trade-offs among them. I don’t impose any cookie-cutter solutions on the independent women I work with – instead, I seek to build a long-term partnership based on mutual respect.
Wealthcare for Women™ measures your success by whether you are on track to achieve your hopes and dreams in conjunction with your ability to live your life intentionally and joyfully today, not by statistical analysis of past market performance and the need to sacrifice today in the hope that you might have enough tomorrow. That’s a fear-based mentality, not one that I embrace.
Wealthcare for Women™ empowers you and other independent women to make financial decisions with ease and confidence, despite the inherent uncertainty of the financial markets and global economy.
Perhaps most importantly, Wealthcare for Women™ is not a destination, it is a journey and a partnership. I’ve created an ongoing process that acknowledges there is always more we can learn together and that is constantly evolving to meet your needs and those of other independent women.