Wealth Management

RETAINER FEE BASIS

We do planning in its truest form, which is a fee basis like an attorney or an accountant, rather than on a commission-dependent basis. We charge a low ongoing retainer fee as opposed to a high one-time fee, which gives us an incentive to continuously help you achieve your financial objectives as opposed to simply providing you with a one-time set of recommendations that never get implemented properly or updated. If at any time you’re dissatisfied with our services, you can simply stop paying your monthly or quarterly fee. There is no contractual term commitment.

BUDGET ANALYSIS

One of the first things we will do is seek to justify our ongoing fee by immediately conducting a budget analysis to determine all of the areas in which we can reduce your ongoing expenses as much as possible without damaging your standard of living. This will include things such as shopping your insurances and reviewing your investments to find optimal combinations of service/product quality and price, as well as pointing out living expenses that may not be necessary or wanted. We find that the vast majority of the time, the small increase in your expenses imposed by our retainer fee is much more than fully offset by the decrease in your expenses we can achieve by conducting this review. We want to improve your net savings rate, not create another drag on it. At no point during our engagement will you ever question why you are still paying us a retainer fee.

We are constantly working for you on your behalf, and we are always looking to be proactive with you and to “move the ball forward." You are not hiring a consultant that will just reactively answer your questions. You are hiring a team of intelligent work horses that will constantly be researching, planning, and implementing on your behalf, pushing you to improve your financial status, and forcing you towards the life goals we help you establish and quantify.

PERSONALIZED FINANCIAL PLAN

For our fee we will develop a financial plan for you and guide you through the entire process, educating you along the way. Once your initial plan is developed, we will guide you through implementation (or do the work for you at your request), and we will continuously review and update your planning on an ongoing basis. We will do financial modeling, analyze coordination gaps, find opportunities, and consider a range of alternatives to improve upon your existing planning, save on income and estate taxes, improve cash flow and savings rates, and guard against unanticipated future headaches.

IMPLEMENTATION PROGRAM

We provide an investment plan implementation program in the form of investment advisory services and in-house portfolio management for which we will also be compensated if you choose to implement any of the investment planning through us, because we’ve found that if we don’t provide those services, the planning often will not get implemented properly, or it will be implemented at a cost too high to make financial sense. We believe that your Investment Planning is best implemented by the same firm that developed the planning for you in order to avoid coordination errors, and so that the portfolio management can potentially be provided at lower cost than if it had to be purchased from a third party. This makes it easier for you to implement and easier to get the synergistic effects of the plan and implementation working together. But the further benefit is that we can provide you with better service because we have control over all the moving parts. Similarly, we can help you with implementing the other aspects of your planning, such as shopping for and facilitating the underwriting of insurance policies, and recommending and coordinating with attorneys, accountants, and other service providers.