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Organizing Your Finances After a Health Scare

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By Brent O’Mara Photo by Maksym Kaharlytskyi on Unsplash The hardest hour in a hospital waiting room is rarely the one anybody expects. A spouse sits there waiting on news from a surgery and realizes, somewhere in the second hour, that she could not name a single institution holding the family accounts . She knows the insurance exists, and she does not know where the papers are or who to call about them. I am Brent O’Mara, and families in Omaha often sit down with me in the weeks after an afternoon like that. They expect the conversation to be about investments. It almost never is. This is written for the household where one person has always handled the money, which describes most of the households I sit with. The arrangement works quietly for years. It fails in a single afternoon, and that afternoon is never on the calendar. What a Health Scare Shows About Household Records A health scare does not change the financial plan. It changes who has to operate the plan, usually at s...
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Passing On a Family Business When One Child Runs It

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By Brent O'Mara Photo by Wai Hsuen Chan on Unsplash A husband and wife sat across my table in Omaha with a question they had been circling for two years. One of their three children runs the company they built, and the other two have never worked inside it. They had come to ask me, Brent O'Mara, how to pass that business to all three of them without leaving a mess behind. My answer was that they were holding two questions at once, and they had been trying to answer them in the wrong order. This is written for owners whose company is the largest thing they will ever hand to their children, and who have more children than operators. In that situation the order of the decisions matters more than the percentages. Ownership and Management Are Different Decisions Management is the question of who runs the company on an ordinary Tuesday . Ownership is the question of who holds the shares, who votes them, and who receives whatever the company distributes. Families treat those a...
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What Fiduciary Means When You Hire a Financial Advisor

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By Brent O'Mara Photo by 2H Media on Unsplash A business owner turned his advisory agreement face up on the table halfway through a planning review and asked what the word fiduciary actually commits me to on a day when nothing is going wrong. I am Brent O'Mara, and I have been answering versions of that question since I started as an intern in 2000. The short answer is that the standard is a duty I owe inside each recommendation, and the longer answer is where that duty shows up when nobody is checking. This is written for the family or the business owner who has read the word in a document and skimmed past it, which is almost everyone. The word is worth understanding because it describes what you are entitled to expect from the person advising you, rather than how a firm prefers to describe itself. What the fiduciary standard obliges a financial advisor to do A fiduciary standard asks an advisor to put the client first inside the advice itself rather than in the languag...
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Business Succession Planning for a Sudden Owner Absence

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By Brent O'Mara Photo by Raj Rana on Unsplash I once sat across from an owner who had a careful plan for turning sixty five and no plan at all for the following Tuesday. He could describe the buyer he hoped for, the range he had in mind and the year he wanted to hand over the keys. I am Brent O'Mara, I work with business owners and multigenerational families in Omaha , and the question I asked him next is one most owners have never been asked. If he could not come in the next morning, and nobody knew when he would be back, who would run the company on Wednesday. He did not have an answer. Almost no owner I ask does, and that gap is the subject of this piece. This is written for owners whose company is the largest thing their family owns, and for the adult children and spouses who would be left sorting it out. The planning most of them have done is real work aimed at the wrong scenario. The exit an owner chooses gets years of attention and the one nobody chooses gets none. ...
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What a Cash Reserve Plan Does in a Hard Market Year

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By Brent O'Mara A family sits at a kitchen table with a printed plan open between them, turning to the page that says which account pays their bills if the next two years go badly. They have read that page before, and reading it during a hard stretch feels like a different document. I am Brent O'Mara, a wealth advisor in Omaha , and I have come to believe that one page does more for a family than any opinion I could offer about where markets go next . This is written for families and business owners who already have a plan and have never tested the part of it that covers a bad year. The question underneath it is easy to ask and uncomfortable to answer. If income fell, or if account values fell for a long stretch, the family needs to know which specific money would pay for groceries, payroll and the mortgage. A Written Cash Reserve Removes the Forced Decision A reserve is money set aside somewhere stable so a household does not have to sell something at an inconvenient mom...
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