We stand apart from our competitors in three significant ways:

• We understand that you invest to accomplish goals that are important to you.
• We respect your priorities regarding savings, giving, working, and risk. Priorities define the lifestyle and quality of life you desire. Your plan is guided by your goals and priorities, not by how much risk you agree to take or savings you can turn over.

• Capital markets without ‘enhancement’ provide sufficient returns to meet most clients’ long term goals.
• Passive management is the best portfolio approach to efficiently capture the returns of the capital markets. Active management adds unnecessary uncertainty and timing risk – unfortunate alignment of client cash flows with material manager underperformance. Increased uncertainty translates into the measureable reduction of lifestyle such as working longer than desired, taking greater risks, saving more, spending or giving less. Please see our article "Alpha or Wealth" for deeper analysis of the subject.

• Householding is used when our clients have multiple accounts.

Management fees are reduced by combining accounts into one portfolio enabling client assets to reach our size discounts faster. The feature is particularly valuable to clients with smaller accounts like children’s trust, and special purpose IRAs.

Commissions are reduced significantly when re-balancing can be accomplished within the household with two or three trades compared to two or three each across the number of accounts.

Re-balancing can often be done within the tax-deferred accounts eliminating capital gains taxes.

Tax-locating assets allows our clients to keep more of their assets’ earnings. For instance, we concentrate taxable fixed income in tax-deferred or exempt accounts to shelter what would otherwise be fully taxable at ordinary income tax rates. We place equities in the taxable accounts as current tax laws favor dividends and long-term capital gains with substantially lower ‘qualified’ rates.

Exchange Traded Funds or ETFs are used exclusively in our model portfolios to offer benefits which include extremely low internal management costs (.16% average), zero capital gains from fund management, extraordinary diversification, ample liquidity, and complete transparency as to holdings.

Our models are strategically back-tested for efficient allocation.

3. Planning:

• Our Wealthcare® approach enables us to focus robust pension planning tools on your unique plan. When we thoroughly understand your valued goals and priorities we develop a recommended set of goals which maximizes your most important goals by 'borrowing from those less important. We balance our efforts to ensure that your lifestyle is not sacrificed needlessly in the process. To arrive at a statistically reliable level of confidence we stress-test your plan thousands of 'lifetimes' through all kinds of market periods.
• We monitor your plan on a quarterly basis. If major market turns or changes in your goals cause your plan to wander outside of tolerance, we'll call to discuss our recommendations to get you back on track. Our suggestions are based on your priorities.
• We bring 30 years of investment experience to our process.

 Client Services:

• We strive to provide prompt and complete attention to your special needs.
• We send quarterly and annual tax reports of gains and losses to you or to your CPA for better tax planning.
• We offer daily portfolio updates and the latest copies of Wealthcare plans on our website as well as ongoing economic commentary.

Why is TIMING so important to you in your investment plan? Timing represents the impact a sequence of market returns has on your investments over your lifetime. Consider the following example:

Meet Harry:

• He is 54 years old
• has an $800,000 portfolio,
• saves $16,000 per year,
• and wants to retire at age 64 on $100,000 annually (in today's dollars).

His advisor:

• Recommends a  portfolio of 60% Stocks and 40% Bonds
• Assumes he will receive an avearage return of: 8.43% per year over his lifetime
• And further assumes he will have an estate worth $3.1 Million at age 92.

However actual results can be dramatically different than those suggested by average return, depending upon the timing of one's saving and spending plans. Consider Harry's savings and spending plan over two actual historical market periods.

Actual market 1960-1998 avg. 9.8%:  Harry exhausted his funds at 90!

Actual market 1940-1978 avg. 7.5%: Harry died with a $2.5 Mil Estate!

If Harry were fortunate enough to live from 1940-1978 he would never worry about money. However, if he lived during the period 1960-1998, he would spend his final years worrying and regretting that it was too late to remedy his situation. Note that Harry went broke with the considerably higher average return, because of the way his cash flows aligned with market variations. Active management adds further uncertainty to a person's plan which translates into reduced lifestyle.

Through our Wealthcare® planning discipline we embrace market volatility as well as your changing goals. By continually monitoring new data and how it impacts the probability of your success we are able to make relatively small adjustments as needed, rather than larger ones later in life when you have less flexibility.

We are compensated by a quarterly fee which is determined by your relationship or account size. Fees begin at 1.5% for the first $250,000 and decline to 0.7% over $2 million. The fee does not cover relatively nominal commission expenses charged by our custodian, Charles Schwab. A complete description of our fee structure is covered in our SEC ADV Brochure. 

If you have specific questions or would like to arrange a free, no obligation consultation, please contact us.