Financial planning entails our thoroughly analyzing your current financial situation, identifying and prioritizing financial goals, finding ways to meet those goals, and then monitoring your progress toward meeting them.
You may want to:
The financial plan details the actions needed to achieve your goals. Through the plan, we provide annual investment targets, commentary on your current situation, and recommendations on how to better utilize your resources. For those who continue to work with us as wealth management clients, we review the plan annually and update it as needed– typically, every five years or when a client is anticipating a change in financial circumstances, such as retirement or job change– at no additional cost.
Through our wealth management services, we help you to implement the financial plan and stay on course as you move forward in your financial life. There’s no value in developing a plan that doesn’t get carried out. By hiring us to provide ongoing investment management and financial advising, we can help ensure that you remain on track to achieve your financial goals.
At the onset, our wealth management services involve:
Thereafter, we will meet with you annually to review the performance of your portfolio and compare where you are to the plan. We spend the majority of time in annual review meetings discussing whatever financial issues you may be facing. We also review account activity on a daily basis and invest accumulated cash in your accounts at least quarterly to ensure that they are balanced according to the asset allocation initially developed for you. We also hope that you will call or email us with any financial problems or questions as they arise, whether they relate to investments, retirement, tax management, home mortgage, new car purchases, employee benefits, rental properties, pension decisions, insurance issues, estate planning, etc.
In managing your investments, our guiding principles are diversification, low costs, and passive management. To maximize your portfolio’s investment potential, we believe that clients should 1) have exposure to a variety of asset classes to keep their portfolios diversified and provide some protection from inevitable market declines; 2) minimize investment expenses, turnover, transaction fees, and taxes, whenever possible; and 3) trust that markets work and that they cannot be outguessed in any reliable or cost-effective way. Markets are not completely efficient, but academic research continually suggests that the existing inefficiencies cannot be leveraged with any degree of certainty through active management. In most cases, trying to time the market or beat market returns by stock picking is counterproductive, resulting simply in higher fees and subpar returns (especially on a risk-adjusted basis), so that is why we stick to low cost, passively-managed, diversified investments.
For potential clients seeking only investment management services (without completing a financial plan), the minimum portfolio account size is $500,000. We may, at our discretion, reduce and/or waive this account minimum.
If you have any questions about your financial future, we're here to help. Please use this form or feel free to call or e-mail us.
(703) 385-0870
