We are a team of wealth managers who focus on helping you realize your goals. Wealth management brings together financial planning and investment management. Wealth management brings together financial planning and investment management. Financial planning shouldn’t revolve around investment products; it should focus on solutions that take your entire financial situation into account to deliver the best outcome. We employ tax efficient strategies in our investment management and financial planning to ensure our clients keep as much of their gains as possible.
Every client is unique, and every financial plan is different. We assess your objectives, your resources, your risk tolerance and any other relevant information in order to develop a financial plan that best fits your needs. It takes several meetings and careful analysis to propose an appropriate plan. The financial plan determines how we manage your portfolio.
Investment Management: We recognize that allocation among investment categories determines a lot of a portfolio's returns and certainly its volatility. Nonetheless, we also believe that sometimes certain investment categories may be over or undervalued and that we can increase returns by taking advantage of these situations. We do not attempt to time the markets. Instead, we continuously monitor the financial markets and adjust our clients' investments in order to take advantage of changing market conditions.
As independent financial advisors, we choose the best products available to achieve your objectives. We are not affiliated with any investment companies, and we are therefore free to choose any products that best serve your needs. We also have an expertise in building custom fixed-income portfolios.
Our clients: They are as diverse as the financial and investment plans we create for them. They include professionals, business owners and retirees of all ages. Typically, our clients have a minimum of $500,000 in assets under our management, although this minimum may vary based on the client’s life stage. This minimum facilitates the creation of custom bond portfolios which are optimal for retirees and those whose objective is to protect their wealth. In some cases, we do accept clients whose investments are below the usual minimum when they are committed to increasing their investments over time.
Fixed Income: We create custom fixed-income portfolios for many of our clients because they are the best way to preserve capital while generating predictable income. Custom fixed-income portfolios provide diversification similar to fixed income mutual funds while allowing the manager to control cash flow and risk. Mutual funds that invest in bonds and notes provide diversification for small investments, but they do not provide the stability of principal, the risk management or the timing of cash flows that custom fixed-income portfolios do.
Equity Investments: We construct the equity portion of portfolios using a combination of mutual funds and exchange-traded funds. Each investment option is selected based on a proprietary set of criteria used to provide our clients with the best quality investment opportunities at the lowest cost.
We use institutional share class mutual funds where available. Institutional shares have much lower expense ratios than other classes of mutual funds because they are geared towards institutional investors. Mutual funds shares that are not institutional shares may have fees to enter or exit the fund (called loads), fees to compensate advisors for selling them (12b-1 fees) and generally higher expenses overall.
Other Investments: We often invest in alternative assets to enhance return while minimizing risk. While investments such as commodities, real estate, futures and arbitrage may be riskier on their own, they may actually lower the overall risk of a portfolio when used in the proper amounts.