Get Off the Ground with Expert Advice You Can Trust

Kara and Mark were able to explain complex financial strategies in ways that were easy for me to understand. They were very prepared and knowledgeable and offered clarity in understanding how best to model my financial plan. I just wish I had more time with them and am considering another flight check in the near future.

In 2017, my husband of 30 years suddenly, unexpectedly, died.

Wow. I still can't believe it.

My oldest brother, Dirk, had long been the architect of our financial planning. After my husband‘s death, I spent a weekend with Dirk to help me sort through what I needed to know.

Dirk was a brilliant financial planner and an early user of MaxiFi, which was then called ESP — Economic Security Planner. During our visit, he ran a report. For the first time in my life, that report painted for me a clearly detailed picture of my financial standing. It showed me how, moving forward, a little tweak here or there could have a significant long term impact on my standard of living, for the rest of my life. For the first time, I could see that, yep, I can do this.

Three years later, Dirk died. I was adrift in every possible way.

Somehow, in the months and years that followed, I was able to track down the program my brother had used to plan my financial future, but it was now called MaxiFi. I bought the program and used Dirk's original ESP report as a template to fill in the assumptions and such. I knew my inputs were off in places, but I also knew I was sometimes right. Feeling more confident, but still, always uncertain.

From then until now, I’ve been looking for help to understand if I’m using MaxiFi correctly. I still follow Dirk's financial advice, ("invest everything you can not afford to lose in TIPs" and, "Jolie, you cannot afford to lose anything"). But with the world turned upside down since his passing, was his advice still on point? Were my MaxiFi reports even close?

Kara and Mark, you answered so many questions I needed to have answered, and many I hadn't even thought to ask. On the deepest level, you helped me realize that I am on the right track, and that Dirk's advice is, for me, still the best advice. What a deep sense of relief you've given me. At the end of our meeting, I literally cried.

I share Dirk's name with you because he knew Larry Kotlikoff. They ran together in economic financial planning circles. They held each other in high regard. I have once spoken to Larry since my brother passed. And he confirmed he had a deep fondness for Dirk.

So, here we are, full circle.

Thank you for helping me understand what has been bothering me for a long, long time.

I will surely have more questions for you moving forward. So please, standby.

Thanks very much, Kara and Mark! We so very much appreciate your patient, warm, friendly approach, and wonderful expertise. Your sequence and methodology were so easy to follow and understand, which made the suggested improvements and future options even more valuable. We were also very impressed with the amount of preparation and review of our Maxifi profile and overall situation prior to our meeting with you. It was clear you tailored our session and your suggestions to our specific situation. Absolutely a great value worth every penny of the Flight Check fee and will pay off many times over in the future in our personal financial journey.

Mark and Kara, thank you so much for two great sessions — where you were so patient to walk me through the functions in MaxiFi at great depth and detail.  

I am sure you meet with many who think in different ways about how to organize their inputs, so I am also thankful for your ability to adapt to my way of processing so much complexity.

The tools are terrific, but not unless you can effectively utilize them. I now feel more able to model different scenarios for tax and long-range income planning which is exactly what I had hoped for.

Thank you again — for your time, patience and expertise.

"My husband was on the fence about the value of MaxiFi. It was good to have neutral & very knowledgeable persons walk us through the model. Also very good to have a detailed sanity check on our inputs and explanation of results. Thanks to Kara and Mark, he is now a MaxiFi convert!"

"Kara and Mark provided an outstanding one to one session with me. I was impressed with how prepared they were to know my specific situation before the meeting began. This enabled our hour together to be very fruitful. Kara and Mark helped me understand the best way to maximize my set-up and understand key reports (like the Year at a Glance report). I greatly advanced my knowledge of using the power of MaxiFi for my financial benefit. Kara and Mark's instruction style and experience is outstanding. I was very impressed with how they clearly and simply explained several key areas of MaxiFi. My flight check experience was a great investment. Thank you Maxifi team!"

"Kara and Mark reviewed my information ahead of our meeting and were able to provide suggestions for input to MaxiFi Planner to clean up my data entry. Along the way I was given tips and tricks on how to use the software, which I really appreciated. I enjoyed learning about MaxiFi and the caring and professional manner in which the discussion was held. I'm very happy with the information I received, and the updated scenarios and base profile that I now have to work with."