Services
We won’t sell you on wealth planning strategies that you don’t need. Instead, we will learn about your situation and goals in-depth and craft financial and investment recommendations that help you achieve your objectives. Your individual strategies will work together as a comprehensive whole and may include retirement planning, tax planning, estate planning, and investments, both traditional and non-traditional.
Formulating a Long-Term Portfolio Strategy
Key to our services is the formulation of a long-term strategy that sets the stage for investment success. Taking into account your unique situation and goals, we develop long-term asset allocation targets that reflect reasonable expectations for future returns, standard deviations, and cross correlations among asset classes. Although these targets are intended to remain constant over relatively long periods of time (e.g., at least five years), earlier adjustments can make sense if:
Your career or personal situation undergoes a significant change
Congress enacts new, substantially different tax laws
The economic or investment environment undergoes fundamental change
Estate Plan Strategy
We work with you to understand your goals for your estate in a manner that both:
Directs assets in a structure appropriate to your family members’ situations
Reduces the inheritance tax burden to the fullest extent possible
Our advice is sensitive to the need to balance tax savings at death against the great complexity that certain vehicles can cause during your lifetime.
Providing for Family Members
Education funding, both for children and grandchildren, is a topic we typically discuss—e.g., contrasting Section 529 plans with the UGMA alternative.
Providing assets for family members with special needs is sometimes a concern, requiring analysis of appropriate vehicles in light of a family’s goals.
We often offer advice on the financial situations of parents or children. Given our commitment to customized financial advice, we may suggest investment portfolios for them that are quite different from what is optimal for the client.
Alternative Investments Strategies
Where the market does not provide the optimal means to invest in an asset category (e.g., real estate, hedge funds, private equity, venture capital, and inflation hedges), we can provide that access through private investment vehicles.
Private investment vehicles typically have the disadvantages of being too specialized (creating concentrated risk), having unreasonably high fees and investment minimums, and offering little to no liquidity to investors.
We utilize private vehicles that avoid these disadvantages whenever possible. We do not charge for our costs in structuring and monitoring these investments but bear the costs ourselves as integral to the services we offer.
Retirement Strategies
We calculate what accumulation of investment assets is necessary to allow you to retire at your desired spending level, given your life expectancy. In short, we give you a definite target.
We identify the paths to that goal and estimate when it is likely that you can reasonably attain it.
Our advice also plans for the regular cash flow you would need in retirement to match your annual spending (e.g., by suggesting a bonus deferral or by erecting a bond ladder).
Income Tax Strategies
We seek to minimize the drag of income taxes on your growth in net worth by:
Exploiting opportunities to shift income from your employment years, when it would bear the maximum tax burden, to retirement
Utilizing investments that offer intrinsic tax efficiency
Allocating investments sensibly between tax-deferred and taxable accounts
As part of this effort, we monitor your annual tax situation and suggest tactics to lighten the overall burden.
Where appropriate, we prepare a strategy for benefiting charity in a way that makes optimal use of tax benefits.
Treating Ad Hoc Financial Issues
We expect—and desire—to advise you on all your financial concerns such as:
Whether to mortgage or refinance a home
What second residence might be feasible to purchase
How much life and liability insurance to carry