The team from Hasenberg Financial Group.

Financial advisor Chris Hasenberg doesn’t want to be a quarterback making clients’ financial decisions for them. Instead, he wants to take the expertise he’s developed over the course of 30 years, combine it with the knowledge of his well-rounded staff, and provide clients with a game plan for their future – whether that means planning for retirement, efficiently spending savings once they are retired, reducing tax liability, and more.

“We try, as a firm, to make the complicated simple,” said Hasenberg, founder of Hasenberg Financial Group in Eau Claire. “We never tell people what do to. We show them options: We will say this is a good option, this is a better option, and this is the best option, in our opinion. But we really act as coaches, and the clients are the quarterbacks making the decisions.”

“We never tell people what do to. We show them options: We will say this is a good option, this is a better option, and this is the best option, in our opinion.”

Volume One readers made some decisions of their own, selecting Hasenberg Financial Group as the Best Financial Planning Service in the latest Best of the Chippewa Valley Reader Poll.

A 1992 graduate of UW-Stout, Hasenberg prides himself on building a strong team of licensed representatives, enrolled agents, and other staff under the Hasenberg Financial Group title.

“I believe in a small town that reputation is important, so that’s why I incorporated my name into it,” he said. “For the longest time, it was me helping people, and now I’ve found leverage in teaching advisors to help people.”

COMPREHENSIVE ADVICE

So how does Hasenberg Financial Group help clients? By providing personalized, thorough advice – and not just on investments. “A lot of firms focus their attention on investments, and they’re important,” he said. “But comprehensive advice is hard to find.” Comprehensive advice, he said, encompasses retirement planning, estate planning, and income taxes.

This approach led him to create the Hasenberg Tax Service. For several years, the tax service has prepared taxes for clients, and beginning this year they are making their services available to the general public.

Why tackle taxes? “Almost every question that I get from a client is technically a tax question,” Hasenberg explained. For example, if a client wants to buy a boat, he must determine how to pay for it. Paying with funds from a retirement account would create a different tax scenario than paying with money from a savings account or by taking out a loan. Having access to a client’s tax documents makes providing advice for such decisions easier, he said.

But Hasenberg emphasized that there’s a difference between tax preparation and tax planning: Tax preparation is filling in boxes on a form about what happened last year; tax planning is working to reduce the size of those numbers in the future. Hasenberg and his team can help do both.

Financial advising is often dubbed “wealth management,” but Hasenberg believes everyone – not just the wealthy – can benefit from good advice. After all, how can people build wealth without making informed decisions?

“At the end of the month, if you’ve got $100 left over, should that go towards retirement, towards cash reserves, towards insurance, towards credit cards, towards education for the kids, towards charity – where should it go?” he said. “We have a structured 12-step system for doing it in the right order. It is something that we utilize heavily here in our practice with everybody from those with negative net worth due to student loans to multimillionaires. It’s a great process.”

PRE- AND POST-RETIREMENT NEEDS

Hasenberg said clients fall into two main groups: pre-retirees and post-retirees. For those preparing for retirement – who are focused on questions such as “Am I saving enough?” And “How much do I need?” – big decisions should be made by working down the 12-step list. For those who are already retired, the primary concern is “How do I protect what I have?” This leads to questions about nursing home planning, tax planning, and estate planning, and Hasenberg Financial Group is equipped to provide guidance and even referrals to attorneys who can prepare necessary documents.

The No. 1 goal of Hasenberg Financial Group is providing uniform advice to clients, which means almost every meeting includes two advisors. That way, guidance is well-informed and consistent.

And, just as Hasenberg Financial Group helps clients plan for their futures, Hasenberg himself intends to continue to build a firm that can forge onward for generations.

“When I started, I was doing this to support myself and my family to make a living,” he reflected. “And with time, being a financial planner, I got to a point where I could retire. Well, I love what I do, and so then it changed from making a living to helping people, and that was a change in philosophy from ‘me, me, me,’ to ‘How many people can we help?’”

Third-party rankings and recognition from rating services or publications are no guarantee of future investment success.  Working with a highly rated advisor does not ensure that a client or prospective client will experience a higher level of performance or results. These ratings should not be construed as an endorsement of the advisor or by any client nor are they representative of any one client’s evaluation. This ratings, rankings and recognition was based on local opinion of residents who submitted votes online through VolumeOne.org. No fee was paid for consideration of any ranking or award.

HASENBERG FINANCIAL GROUP

431 E. Clairemont Ave., Suite B, Eau Claire • (715) 839-6566 • hasenberginc.com

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