You want to retire with more, but would rather spend less time managing your investments.
We provide fee-only financial planning and wealth management, delivered with care.
What We Offer
Our Goal: Deliver 3% Advisor Excess Returns
Our goal is to provide comprehensive services that generate 3% excess returns over average individual or broker returns. We follow a disciplined investing framework focused on six key areas:
Suitable Asset Allocation
Cost Effective Investments (low expenses / high relative sharpe ratio)
Rebalancing
Behavioral Factors
Asset Location (tax efficiency)
Distribution Strategy
In a recent paper, "Putting a Value on Your Value: Quantifying Vanguard Advisor's Alpha", March 2014, Vanguard Research, the authors estimated that advisors following the Vanguard Alpha framework can add 'about 3%' (before fees). Though this is not a guarantee of 3% excess return, the key point is that we focus on these areas to generate potential excess returns.
Build Confidence That Your Future is Secure
We build a plan for you based on your goals and spending needs. We'll show you how much you need to save and invest. We adjust the plan until we can simulate >90% confidence your investments can meet your goals. We work with you to change spending, savings and target risk-return until the plan will work for your personal situation.
Planning +. Our planning process goes much deeper than your core investment plan. We help you understand a number of financial risks you may face in life and help you with solutions. Our services include: tax & estate planning, risk assessment and consulting. We can help you identify risk and weigh options to minimize those risk.
Research & Analysis Drives Discipline, Beating Emotions and Luck
We put heavy emphasis on planning and investing based on evidence and analytics. We build our models based on sound academic research. We select investments based on research and fundamental factor analysis and we use a wide range of software tools to model and build your financial plan. Decision making based on emotions is prone to errors. By following a disciplined approach, we look to minimize such errors.
How It Works
Personal Financial Plan
We start by doing a complete review of your financial situation -- income, spending, savings, retirement and other goals. We make projections through your lifetime with a goal of achieving your plan with > 90% confidence. We update your plan annually or when there are significant changes in your circumstances. The plan will set out the target risk-return we will seek to achieve on your portfolio. We look to take on only as much risk as necessary to achieve your goal plan.
Allocation That is Right for You
We write an Investment Policy Statement that starts with your financial plan and takes it to the next step by defining your target risk and return. From here, we will start with one of our model portfolios and tune it for your specific needs. Each model portfolio defines asset classes and subclasses that are designed to generate the most efficient return for a given level of risk.
Investment Selection
Investment selection is the process of taking your model portfolio and selecting specific investments. We primarily use low cost ETF and mutual funds. Studies have shown that fund expense may be the single most significant factor for predicting a funds future returns. We don't look to beat the market - most active fund managers do not beat the market and/or trying to beat the market could cause more risk than is right for your plan.
We may use semi-actively managed funds, but only if our research shows that the manager has produced meaningful risk adjusted returns. We also practice tactical asset allocation. This means that we make changes from your core model portfolio seeking to take advantage of short term value opportunities or to avoid risk.
Rebalancing & Monitoring
Each quarter we generate performance reports for your portfolio. Studies by Dalbar Associates and others have shown that the typical investor buys when the market is high and sells when the market is low. By using a disciplined rebalancing approach, we look to take the emotions out of the picture. We manage risk by putting you in the right long term allocation and work with you to get comfortable with the portfolio fluctuations so we don't chase returns or pull money out in a panic. We take tax impacts and trading costs into consideration to reduce drag on your returns.
Risk Identification & Mitigation
We won't sell you insurance, annuities or other such products. What we will do is help you understand the types of financial risks you are exposed to and look at all the options available. For example, young families with children may want to protect against income loss by using term life insurance. Those concerned about the potential of long term care needs or the risk of outliving there assets may benefit from long term care insurance or annuities. We have an array of tools to help with special projects such as when to take social security or making pension decisions such as lump sum or payout options.