Investment Management: Strategy & discipline

Creating customized financial plans isn't all that we do.  We also develop and manage highly effective, customized investment strategies for individuals and families no matter what phase of life’s journey you may be experiencing: your working years, when you’re creating and building wealth. Or a phase later in life, when you’re preparing to reap the rewards of a well-earned retirement. Here’s our approach to both phases.

Creating and Building Wealth

This is the time for having the discipline to stick to a long-term, strategic plan based on your specific financial goals and time horizon.

In the wealth building phase, we recommend you and your family have a diversified portfolio tilted more toward equities while you are farther from retirement. As you move closer to retirement, we plan accordingly so your portfolio becomes more conservative as appropriate for your situation.

We can take care of determining when such moves are necessary, based on your family’s specific plans.

Creating a Sustainable Retirement

We can help you experience retirement with the same kind of certainty delivered through a paycheck. We ease the transition that comes when you change focus from building a nest egg, to using your nest egg to a create a lifelong income stream.

Our process blends financial planning, tax planning and investment management to implement a sustainable retirement income. The key ingredients of the process bonds for stability and income combined with stocks for the growth needed to hedge against inflation.

In addition, we coordinate the complexities of your specific retirement income planning situation, which may include such factors as:

• Deferred compensation payouts
• Social Security maximization techniques
• Stock options exercises
• IRA Required Minimum Distributions
• Post Retirement Roth conversions

Our Investment Portfolio Philosophy

Your investment portfolio should relate to your financial plan

Determine the financial goals that you want to achieve. What will they cost? When do you want to accomplish them? Do this first by creating a financial plan. Only then can a customized investment plan be built.

We believe that your investment plan must be designed to help you achieve your specific goals. If you invest your assets, without tying them to your well-thought-out goals, how do you have any confidence that you will accomplish those goals? Or that your money will last your lifetime?

Create an Investment Policy Statement

We believe in determining the proper investment mix given your financial goals and your risk tolerance. Not based on what the markets have done recently.

Remain disciplined through the entire market cycle

We believe that investors are hurt by jumping in and out of the stock market based on fear and/or greed. Creating an investment strategy that is based on a long-term view with adjustments based on changes in your plans, goals, or life, rather than whims of the stock market help you achieve your long term goals.

Use the right investment for the job

We believe in a passive investment style for the equity portion of the portfolio, using investments such as Vanguard index ETFs, and DFA funds.

For the bond portion of the portfolio we use bond index funds and bond ETFs, and depending on the situation individual bond holdings such as government agency bonds and CDs.

Minimize Investment Expenses

Minimizing investment expenses translates into more money staying in the portfolio, which helps you achieve your financial goals. One of the benefits of passive investments is their low cost.

Tax Location Matters

We believe that tax efficiency, and potentially improved overall after tax returns, can be achieved through asset location strategy. Because different types of investments are taxed at different rates, and different types of investments generate different amounts of taxable income, paying attention to the placement of investments in taxable versus tax deferred/tax free accounts can be beneficial.