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The Envision Process

A Quick Tour Around The Envision Process

Wells Fargo Advisors’ Envision process creates an effective, easy-to-understand method for you to prioritize and achieve important life goals. When you first develop your Envision plan, you and your financial advisor will probably start with “Defining major life goals” and then address the other areas of the Envision process. As your life changes, your Envision plan is flexible to change too, and you can revisit your Envision plan at any stage that is appropriate for your personal situation.

Define Major Life Goals

You and your financial advisor will sit down together to begin exploring your goals and dreams and discuss any concerns you might have around achieving them.

Ideal and acceptable goals

Throughout your conversations, you’ll examine your ability to achieve your goals in multiple scenarios, starting with the ideal and the acceptable. The ideal scenario represents your goals and dreams in a “perfect world.” The acceptable scenario represents the compromises you could make to your ideal goals and still feel comfortable with your life.

Prioritize goals

To explore as many of your ideal goals as possible, we encourage the use of our Envision Priority Cards. This interactive activity ensures that you and your financial advisor are on the same page, working together to achieve the goals you value most.

“Stress test” goals

To determine the level of confidence you can achieve with your ideal and acceptable goals, the Envision technology stress-tests each scenario 1,000 times. During each of these 1,000 iterations, your goals are subjected to simulated random market returns (up years, down years, flat years, etc.) to help you determine how likely you are to achieve your goals.

Recommendation

“In balance” target confidence

Once your financial advisor has an understanding of your ideal or acceptable goals, he or she will create a recommended scenario incorporating the goals you value most while potentially deemphasizing some of your lower priority goals.

Implement allocation

Based on your goals, dreams, concerns, risk tolerance, and financial circumstances, your financial advisor can propose an investment mix to help you achieve those goals.

Monitor Progress

Your Envision plan will create a benchmark unique to your goals and circumstances as a way to track progress along the way. This information will update each night and is available on your statements and online.

New goals and priorities

Change can present challenges, whether it happens in your own life or in the world around you. If your goals or financial circumstances change, or the markets fluctuate, it’s easy to update your Envision plan to account for the changes and measure the impact it has on your ability to stay on track.

Envision® methodology: Based on accepted statistical methods, the Envision tool uses a simulation model to test your Ideal, Acceptable and Recommended Investment Plans. The simulation model uses assumptions about inflation, financial market returns and the relationships among these variables. These assumptions were derived from analysis of historical data. Using Monte Carlo simulation, the Envision tool simulates 1,000 different potential outcomes over a lifetime of investing varying historical risk, return, and correlation amongst the assets. Some of these scenarios will assume strong financial market returns, similar to the best periods of history for investors. Others will be similar to the worst periods in investing history. Most scenarios will fall somewhere in between. Elements of the Envision presentations and simulation results are under license from Wealthcare Capital Management LLC. © 2003-2021 Wealthcare Capital Management LLC. All Rights Reserved. Wealthcare Capital Management LLC is a separate entity and is not directly affiliated with Wells Fargo Advisors.