Before Lori Colclasure was an advertising partner in this magazine, she was a fourth.

She had close friends who lived in Admirals Cove, and when they booked early court time with David, the pro at the time, they occasionally found that they needed one more player.

Eight on a Sunday morning seemed to be their favorite time to step onto the courts, and Lori was always open to the invite as a fan of the game. About once a month, the phone would ring, and most of the time, she was on board. Those tennis dates were all it took to make her a regular presence on the courts, and she remembers the time fondly. Unfortunately, it ended when the couple divorced, and that was that…

What she does with the rest of the week, however, is what we’d like to share today.

Lori is a CPA and a CFP, which is a combination rarer than it sounds. Those two sets of letters look like cousins, but they come from entirely different schooling, different testing, different continuing education, and different professional discipline. "There aren't many who have both," she says, "because each is very labor-intensive and in-depth." Keeping both licenses active runs about 120 hours of continuing education every two years, roughly 80 for the CPA side and 30 or 40 for the CFP side. That is two full work weeks a year spent in a classroom, so to speak!

Lori started as a CPA and has been one for more than 40 years. She added the planning side about 20 years ago, and the reason she gives is disarmingly simple. "Numbers were always my thing, but more so numbers and people. The reason I went from CPA and accounting work to CPA and CFP was to be able to work with people versus working with numbers only." When you are a CPA, she explains, you are working with numbers. When you are a financial planner, you are working with people.

Here is where the two halves come together, and it is the part that tends to make people’s ears perk up.

Accountants, Lori says with affection for her own profession, get a bit of a bad reputation for reporting what already happened. The year is over, the transactions are done, and the return is essentially a very expensive history book. Financial planning, meanwhile, is supposed to be forward-looking: retirement, taxes, insurance, estate, investments. But if the planner never sees the tax return, the plan is being built with a blindfold on. "If I don't know your tax bracket, I don't know your legacy, and I don't know other things about you, how can I plan efficiently?"

So she reads tax returns. Not to prepare them, and she is careful about that distinction, since a CFP is not there to give tax advice. She reads them to get ahead of things, so the CPA never has to deliver that most expensive sentence in the English language: "I wish I had known you were going to do that..." Sell a business in the wrong calendar year, and you may find out what that sentence costs. Wait until January 1, and you may find out what it saves.

Now, the honest objection. Most Admirals Cove members already have “somebody.” A guy. A firm. A brother-in-law day-trader. Lori has heard it several thousand times and does not take it as a challenge.

"I'm glad you have a guy," she says. "What does your guy do?" Usually the answer is that he handles investments. Which is fine, and she is quick to say she would never claim her portfolios outshine anyone else's. What she is talking about is everything that happens around the portfolio. Which accounts you are filling while you are still earning, and, far less discussed, which accounts you should be drawing from once you stop. When to turn on Social Security and what to do in the years before it. What to handle before Medicare, when the IRMAA surcharges enter the picture. "It's not just allocation," she says. "It's location. Are your investments in the right bucket?"

She offers a story that will make a few readers quietly reach for a file cabinet. One of her largest clients today spent five years as a very small one, because his money was with his brother, who was an advisor. Family is family. Eventually the brother arranged to sell his practice; the client did not care for the buyer, and eight to ten million dollars came over. What surfaced was not villainy, but just fine. "Fine is okay," Lori says, "but why do fine when you can do better than fine?" Along the way she opened a donor-advised fund for him, which is a charitable account you fund now and grant from over time, for a December deduction. When his tax return came through three months later, the deduction was not on it. Had nobody read the return, a $100,000 charitable gift would have delivered exactly zero tax benefit.

That is the whole argument in one anecdote. It is not that your current help is bad. It is that it may not be thorough, and thorough is a different animal.

If you would like a second set of eyes, Asset Advisory Services does complimentary reviews. Bring what you have, bring the goals, bring last year's return. "I'm not going to give away the farm," Lori says, and nobody should expect a free financial plan over coffee. But you will get an educated read on whether everything is buttoned up.

Lori is also refreshingly recognizable to a lot of people at this stage of life. She describes herself as the sandwich generation, "one of the perfect examples of being stuck smack in the middle of the Oreo cookie," with grandchildren, children, and an 88-year-old mother. She grew up in Westchester, went to school in Washington, D.C., detoured through Oklahoma for three years, and has now been in Florida for 42 years. Same husband for 42 years too, which she delivers as a punchline. "Same husband, same house. Not always the same house, but same husband." Two daughters, both raised here, both Gators girls, and of course her two beautiful granddaughters.

Lori is quick to add that she is not a one-woman operation pretending otherwise. She is her clients' person, full stop, but there is a team behind her, and when she is traveling, she copies Andrew so a trade or a follow-up does not sit waiting. Clients occasionally beg her not to retire. She could, she says. She has no interest. "I didn't work all those years to get these degrees, study, pass these tests, and do continuing education and keep all these designations to just say, that was fun."

As for when to call her, Lori has a rule that saves everyone a lot of deliberating. "If it has a dollar sign, you should call me."  For a firm that has been in business 45 years, that is a remarkably short mission statement, and as one of her recent ads shared, she’s only a golf ball drive away.

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Our office suite is located on the 3rd floor of the Three Palms Center on Alternate A1A South in Jupiter. The four-story blue glass building is located on the east side of Alternate A1A, 1- ½ miles south of Indiantown Road and 2 miles north of Donald Ross Road.