Our process, outlined below, explains how we’ll work with you over the years to keep your financial life aligned with your current and changing needs.
DESIGN | BUILD | PROTECT® – STEP ONE
Understanding your values goals and challenges
One of the most important parts of designing a better long-term financial plan is developing a better understanding of you. By discovering, and continually rediscovering, your ever-changing values, goals and challenges, we help you to ensure your personal and financial priorities align — starting from where you’d like to go, then working back from there.
DESIGN | BUILD | PROTECT® – STEP TWO
Building a holistic financial plan
It’s a comprehensive approach, informed by your life vision to not only help you reach your more granular goals, like debt optimization, but also to prepare for more meaningful goals, like improving your wellness, providing for family and making a long-term impact.
DESIGN | BUILD | PROTECT® – STEP THREE
Evolving as your needs and the world change
We’ll continually educate you on how changes in the markets, economy, tax legislation and the emergence of new strategies can improve your overall plan. We’ll be there to provide guidance in market downturns, and to help you best take advantage of upward trends in the US and global economy.
Working with us
What to expect
Introductory Meeting
This is a chance to see if we’re the right fit for your needs. We’ll take some time to get to know each other, answer your questions, and explain what we do and how we do it.
Understanding Your Goals
Once engaged, we’ll begin our in-depth process of discovering your current financial circumstances, your risk tolerance, and the goals you have for the future. This process includes tasks such as data gathering, financial analysis, goal setting, and initial plan development. We’ll present our thoughts and suggestions before creating a more formal strategy.
Creating a Strategy
We’ll create a plan to help you achieve your vision of success. Our strategy will focus on honoring your risk tolerance, future tax consequences of investment decisions, and where you are on the timeline towards retirement.
Presenting Recommendations
We’ll meet with you to discuss our recommendations and give you the opportunity to ask questions and get clarification. We’ll make sure you understand and are completely comfortable with the plan before moving forward. Our goal is to provide you with financial peace of mind, and to that end we strive to help you understand the details of our recommendations.
Implementing the Plan
Upon your approval, we’ll begin executing the strategies within the plan. We’ll inform you with regular progress updates as we work.
- Updating asset allocations as needed
- Creating your account access
- Working with your CPA or attorney
- Documenting all work performed
- Setting up your statements and ensuring your understand them
- Automating contributions where required
Monitoring Performance
We will oversee and monitor your plan and its’ performance behind the scenes. We’ll reach out when necessary to make you aware of any important changes in financial markets, or where opportunities to improve performance arise.
Our approach is a collaborative process and we always welcome your input. Regular meetings will be scheduled, and of course we’re available at all times to discuss your needs throughout the year.
Frequently asked questions
We offer our services to individuals, families, businesses, trusts, partnerships, not‑for‑profit organizations and retirement plans who wish to pursue long‑term goals based on our strategic approach to managing wealth.
We conduct initial and ongoing deep discovery, to determine clients’ financial needs in relation to their unique values; goals; personal, professional and institutional relationships; assets; and interests. We then form a far-reaching plan to achieve those goals. We gather expertise – or we are prepared to work with existing alliances – to ensure that each component within the strategy is carefully executed and seamlessly integrated to serve the overall purpose.
There is no cost for our initial Discovery and Investment Plan meetings. We feel it’s time well spent to first get to know one another – before we seek mutual commitment, and before we begin charging a fee.
Minimum portfolio size is $1,000,000. If your current asset level does not meet our minimum requirements but you have unique circumstances you would like to discuss, please do not hesitate to give us a call.
Before any changes are made, we first analyze your existing portfolio and discuss our recommendations with you. Our overall goal is for your portfolio to make sense for you and your lifetime objectives, in the most cost‑effective way possible
Ways we achieve this goal are to capture your unique willingness, ability and need to take on market risk via appropriate (often global) diversification; to minimize the expenses involved in investing; to manage for appropriate asset location between taxable and tax‑sheltered accounts; and to eliminate any unnecessary complexity within the collection of accounts within your portfolio. If existing holdings lend themselves to these objectives, we leave them in place. If changes are warranted, we work with you to ensure any transitions occur as smoothly and cost‑effectively as possible.
While you grant us Limited Power of Attorney (LPOA) to execute transactions on your behalf, you remain in control of your assets. Accounts are held in your name at a quality custodian such as Charles Schwab Institutional or Fidelity Investments.
For managing your financial portfolio, we offer a prudent approach based on our fiduciary relationship with you as your trusted investment advisor. Fiduciary duty is generally considered the highest legal duty one party can have to another. As a Registered Investment Advisor firm, we have a legal responsibility to always act in your best interests – and we take that responsibility very seriously.
Many other financial service firms offer an approach based on “active management.” Active management assumes that the markets are generally inefficient, allowing clever individuals to regularly exploit and profit from the anomalies (beyond the costs of consistently seeking and executing such trades).
And yet, there is overwhelming academic evidence that the collective wisdom of all market players – especially in today’s electronic era – results in highly efficient markets. Markets reflect fair pricing almost instantaneously upon release of any good or bad price related news. In offering a “passive management” approach, we heed the academic wisdom. We assume that the opportunities to exploit inefficiencies are too few and far between to effectively and affordably pursue.
Our philosophy is that equity investments are for growth; fixed income investing has a vital mission all its own: to control overall volatility in a portfolio and provide a stable financial base. It should act as the vehicle for steady, reliable income and contingency reserves. We address your fixed income needs as an integral part of your overall portfolio as well as by considering the special needs, characteristics and (often hidden) costs inherent in the bond market.
If a custom bond portfolio makes sense for you, we build one for you based on analysis of each bond’s full range of characteristics (sector, maturity, credit rating and more). Through our relationship with Focus Financial Partners we have access to strategic fixed income resources and a network of local and national bond dealers that help ensure a wide range of security availability as well as fair and competitive institutional level pricing for you.