Highland Trust Partners - February Business Spotlight

Highland Trust Partners was founded on the principle that our clients’ interests always come first. Building on this tradition, we are proud to be at the forefront of the pioneering trend on integrating life planning with financial planning. As your Financial Life Planners, we will first help you to define and design your unique version of financial independence. Within this framework, we will then develop a comprehensive financial plan that aligns your values and priorities and supports your life goals.

Our Financial Life Planning services cover:

• Comprehensive Financial Planning
• Business Owner and Business Succession Planning
• Special Needs Planning
• Employer Retirement Plans
• Portfolio Management
• Charitable Giving Plans

Highland Trust Partners provides services that support financial well-being and financial freedom. We help our clients eliminate financial stress about the future and align their finances around their goals and values.

We are a relationship-based firm. We believe strongly in knowing our clients and their families well so that we may help them with the most important things in their lives. We are passionate about what we do to improve the lives of our clients.

Recently, Advisor Amy Parrish helped a business owner transition out of his business into retirement. We modeled different retirement and investment strategies until he and his wife were confident in their ability to live the retirement lifestyle they envisioned and still maintain a legacy for their children and grandchildren.

Amy also helped a client establish a legacy of charitable giving by using the required minimum distribution from his IRA. We established an endowed scholarship for nurses at a local community foundation and helped him and his family research and establish giving plans for other charities that they value.

These are just two recent examples of the degree of detail we take when crafting a comprehensive financial plan for a client.

We left a large corporate brokerage firm and formed Highland Trust Partners because we wanted to serve as fiduciaries and let financial planning be our core service. A challenge for us at a large firm was their compensation method and not allowing us to serve as fiduciaries. We were not permitted to charge for financial planning and could only be compensated if a client invested assets with us to manage. Now we can charge for financial planning services alone. We believe this allows us to be completely objective in our recommendations and work with a variety of clients.

Highland Trust Partners understands that we are supported by our communities, so it is our responsibility to give time, energy and finances back to the people and organizations that make up the backbones of our communities. Everyone on our team is encouraged to get involved with a cause or foundation that is important to them, and many of us are associated with several. As a firm, we participate in the Alzheimer’s Walk, provide support to community schools, have team members involved in civic organizations and founded the Georgia Special Needs Alliance (GASNA). 

Highland Trust Partners continues to grow to better serve our existing clients and to offer financial life planning to more people. We work as a team and have advisors of different ages and experience. We are always looking to add new people coming into the industry and veterans in the industry who share our passion for helping clients.

We enjoy being a part of the Walton County Chamber of Commerce and participate in many different events. We’ve met professionals in other areas like accountants, attorneys, insurance brokers and business coaches that enhance our work with clients and whose expertise we may need to help our clients implement their plans. It’s also been a good way to introduce our services to the community and have conversations with business owners and individuals about how we might help them.

Highland Trust Partners is made up of individuals who are passionate about their work and care deeply about their clients and each other. We don’t take ourselves to seriously though because we believe “It’s okay to act goofy, it’s okay to have fun because when we’re laughing the work still gets done.”