Coffee with Michele Clark, CFP® June 2017

Come to the Community Room at Kaldi’s in Chesterfield, MO with your financial planning questions and enjoy a cup of coffee with Michele Clark CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNERTM professional in St. Louis.

Financial Planning Questions Answered

There is no prepared presentation, just a casual conversation in a small group environment; your opportunity to pick our brains.  Feel free to invite family or friends who could benefit from an hour with us.  Open to registered attendees only, due to the size of the room.

Coffee with Michele Clark
Kaldi’s Coffee Chesterfield, MO
Wednesday, June, 14th, 2017
10:30 am to 11:30 am

RSVP Information
RSVP online Clark Hourly Financial Planning and Investment Management RSVP or call 636-264-0732.  Space is limited.  Coffee and pastries are complimentary.

Kaldi’s Coffee Chesterfield address and map
The Community Room is an enclosed room in the back of the coffee shop.

We hope you can join us!

Coffee with Michele Clark, CFP® and Friends May 2017

Come to the Community Room at Kaldi’s in Chesterfield, MO with your financial planning and long-term care, life, and disability insurance questions and enjoy a cup of coffee with Michele Clark CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNERTM professional in St. Louis.  Michele has invited insurance brokers to be at the event to be able to answer your questions.

There is no prepared presentation, just a casual conversation in a small group environment; your opportunity to pick our brains.  Feel free to invite family or friends who could benefit from an hour with us.  Open to registered attendees only, due to the size of the room.

Financial Planning and Insurance Questions Answered

Coffee with Michele Clark and Friends 

Kaldi’s Coffee Chesterfield, MO
Wednesday, May 10th, 2017
10:30 am to 11:30 am

RSVP Information
RSVP online Clark Hourly Financial Planning and Investment Management RSVP or call 636-264-0732.  Space is limited.  Coffee and pastries are complimentary.

Kaldi’s Coffee Chesterfield address and map
The Community Room is an enclosed room in the back of the coffee shop.

We hope you can join us!

Coffee with Michele Clark, CFP ® and Friends March 2017

Come to the Community Room at Kaldi’s in Chesterfield, MO with your financial planning and health insurance questions and enjoy a cup of coffee with CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ professional Michele Clark and Diana Wilson health insurance professional.

There is no prepared presentation, just a casual conversation in a small group environment; your opportunity to pick our brains.  Feel free to invite family or friends who could benefit from an hour with us.  Open to registered attendees only, due to the size of the room.  RSVP at our website Clark Hourly Financial Planning and Investment Management RSVP or call 636-264-0732.

You may have health insurance questions like:

  • What is the difference between private insurance and the marketplace?
  • What is Medicare Part A, B, and D and what does it cover?
  • How does a Medicare supplement work?
  • What is Medicare Advantage?
  • What is the donut hole I hear about?
  • How does COBRA play a part in this?
  • How does the ACA tax credit work?

Or maybe you just really like pastries and coffee.  We would love to see you.

Financial Planning and Health Insurance Questions Answered

Coffee with Michele and Friends
Kaldi’s Coffee Chesterfield, MO
Wednesday, March 8, 2017
10:30 am to 11:30 am

RSVP Information

RSVP at our website Clark Hourly Financial Planning and Investment Management RSVP or call 636-264-0732.

Kaldi’s Coffee Chesterfield, MO address and map

Asset Allocation: Rebalancing a Portfolio in an Appreciated Market

You probably already know you need to monitor your investment portfolio and update it periodically. Even if you’ve chosen an asset allocation, market forces may quickly begin to tweak it.

For example, if stock prices go up, you may eventually find yourself with a greater percentage of stocks in your portfolio than you want, and therefore a more aggressive portfolio than you originally intended. If the market corrects, your portfolio will go down more than you originally felt comfortable with, because you had more in stock than you originally intended, due to stock market appreciation.

Do you have a strategy for dealing with those changes? You’ll probably want to take a look at your individual investments, but you’ll also want to think about your asset allocation.

How rebalancing works

To bring your asset allocation back to the original percentages you set for each type of investment, you’ll need to do something that may feel counterintuitive: sell some of what’s working well and use that money to buy investments in other areas that now represent less of your portfolio.

Typically, you’d buy enough to bring your percentages back into alignment. This keeps what’s called a “constant weighting” of the relative types of investments.

Let’s look at a hypothetical illustration. If stocks have risen, a portfolio that originally included only 60% in stocks might now have 70% in equities. Rebalancing would involve selling some of the stock and using the proceeds to buy enough of other asset classes to bring the percentage of stock in the portfolio back to 60%. This example doesn’t represent actual returns; it merely demonstrates how rebalancing works. Maintaining those relative percentages not only reminds you to take profits when a given asset class is doing well, but it also keeps your portfolio in line with your original risk tolerance.

Methods for Rebalancing your Portfolio

Knowing that the market can be volatile and that rebalancing is a disciplined process that helps offset the risk of volatility, how do you know when to rebalance your portfolio? There are a couple of methods for rebalancing.

Target Bands

One common rule of thumb is to rebalance your portfolio whenever one type of investment gets more than a certain percentage out of line, say, 5 to 10%. This type of monitoring typically requires sophisticated software and an alert system to send you an automated alert whenever your portfolio is outside of acceptable balance range.

Otherwise it would be a daily manual exercise of updating the value of each investment and the relative value of the asset classes of the overall portfolio. This is a daily disciplined practice that most investors would not maintain on a sustained basis over years, which would be required.  When we work with clients on an investment management basis, we use Target Bands as our method of rebalancing. We can do this because we have daily access to their account information and the software to monitor the accounts versus our target allocation.

Annual Rebalancing

You could also set a regular date for rebalancing. To stick to this strategy, you’ll need to be comfortable with the fact that investing is cyclical and all investments generally go up and down in value from time to time. When we work with clients on an hourly basis, we encourage them to come back to us on an annual basis for portfolio rebalancing. Because we do not have access to their accounts, we rely on investment statements that they provide us. In this situation, this is a good way to rebalance the portfolio back to the target allocation. The concern comes when too much time elapses between rebalancing periods and due to market fluctuation the portfolio can become an allocation that is not in line with their risk tolerance.

Our example has been about an appreciated stock market, because that is the market that we are experiencing. However, in a depressed market you would also want to rebalance. If stock prices go down, you might worry that you won’t be able to reach your financial goals because you no longer have the stocks needed to hedge against inflation, so you would want to rebalance back to your original asset allocation model. The same is true for bonds and other investments.

Balance the costs against the benefits of rebalancing

Don’t forget that too-frequent rebalancing can have adverse tax consequences for taxable accounts. Since you’ll be paying capital gains taxes if you sell a stock that has appreciated, you’ll want to check on whether you’ve held it for at least one year. If not, you may want to consider whether the benefits of selling immediately will outweigh the higher tax rate you’ll pay on short-term gains. This doesn’t affect accounts such as 401(k)s or IRAs, of course.

In taxable accounts, you can avoid or minimize taxes in another way. Instead of selling your portfolio winners, simply invest additional money in the asset classes that are underweighted in your portfolio. Doing so can return your portfolio to its original mix.

Sometimes rebalancing can be done in the tax deferred or tax free accounts, which will minimize the changes that need to be made in the taxable accounts, to minimize tax consequences.

You’ll also want to think about transaction costs; make sure any changes are cost-effective.

Also, look out for the impact that a sale in the taxable accounts can have in other areas of your financial plan. If your income goes up will it impact your FAFSA/college financial aid, Medicare means testing, Social Security benefit be taxed at a higher rate, put you in a higher income tax rate, etc.

No matter what your strategy, work with your financial professional to keep your portfolio on track.

Portions of this blog post are from an article prepared by Broadridge Investor Communications Solutions, Inc. Copyright 2017  But, I just had to add my own two cents!

Coffee with Michele Clark, CFP ® and Friends February 2017

Come to the Community Room at Kaldi’s in Chesterfield, MO with your financial planning and life and disability insurance questions and enjoy a cup of coffee with CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ professional Michele Clark and David Walsh Investment Advisor Representative.

There is no prepared presentation, just a casual conversation in a small group environment; your opportunity to pick our brains.  Feel free to invite family or friends who could benefit from an hour with us.  Open to registered attendees only, due to the size of the room.  RSVP at our website Clark Hourly Financial Planning and Investment Management RSVP or call 636-264-0732.

During tax season, Jan will be tending to her tax clients so I will be inviting a variety of other professionals to sit in with me during my coffee events. You may have questions about how features on old cash value life insurance policies work or how to think through how much life insurance you really should have.  Or questions about disability insurance when you have a large portion of your income from variable compensation. Or you might have a special needs child or grandchild and need to learn how to provide care for their lifetime.

Or maybe you just really like pastries and coffee.  We would love to see you.

Financial Planning and Life and Disability Insurance Questions Answered

Coffee with Michele and Friends
Kaldi’s Coffee Chesterfield, MO
Wednesday, February 8, 2017
10:30 am to 11:30 am

RSVP Information

RSVP at our website Clark Hourly Financial Planning and Investment Management RSVP or call 636-264-0732.

Kaldi’s Coffee Chesterfield, MO address and map