Services
Investment Advice and Management
You can hold any kind of account here. I primarily deal with individual/joint/trust accounts (taxable) and retirement accounts like IRAs or Roth IRAs (tax deferred or tax-free). Ordinarily, I am a fiduciary advisor, paid on a fee basis, and that’s what I mostly recommend. But I’m willing to get paid on a commission basis – it’s just a different relationship.
More and more, I manage my clients’ investments with discretion. That means we discuss the overall allocation of the portfolio to benefit the client the most under the current conditions and then the client delegates discretion to me to select the specific investments within the constraints of the overall allocation.
Insurance and Annuities
Insurance contracts pool risk and protect specified assets – property, lifetime potential earnings, lifetime income, etc. Insurance is based on sophisticated statistical techniques and has a history back around 400 years. As private enterprises, they are very safe – it is highly unusual for an insurer to go out of business, especially given current government regulations. Which is not to say it doesn’t happen – AIG, one of the world’s largest, almost went down in 2008 – but it is highly unusual.
I am licensed to sell and service life insurance, long-term care insurance, and annuities, either fixed or variable. These are very useful under the right circumstances, and quite costly and not useful under the wrong circumstances. These are complex products/services and need to be discussed at length before deciding to buy. I’m happy to discuss them and, if appropriate, to sell them.
Financial Advice on Any Issue
How to save for retirement? How much do you need? When to retire? How to live in retirement? What to leave to the kids and how to do that? How to make charitable contributions? Should I have life insurance? All the questions that are normally considered in “Financial Planning” are good to discuss and think about. I have many years of experience and study and education and I’m happy to help you think about any financial and economic issues. At no charge if you’re a client.
But “Financial Planning”, not so much! My experience is that many advisors highlight the need for a “comprehensive financial plan” and are eager to roll out their firm’s spreadsheet-based financial planning system. They spend lots of time, for a fee, gathering information, making some possibly (questionable) assumptions, and crunching the numbers you give them. Then they print up a fancy document with charts and figures and sidebars of advice, all of which is 3-hole punched and placed in a fancy binder (if not actually bound into a book!) which is presented (with fan-fare: Ta-Da!) to the client, who flips through it, puts it on a shelf with a sense of relief (There! That’s done!), and never consults it again.
Okay! Perhaps I exaggerate… Clearly, I’m not your normal, run-of-the-mill advisor!
Does this mean you should NOT think about your finances? Your goals? What you’re trying to accomplish in your life? Not at all! These are important issues and as I said above, I’m happy to consult with you and help you with those decisions. And you definitely should make these decisions and commit to activities and policies that aim for your goals.
But don’t fool yourself! Be prepared for all your assumptions to change and be prepared to revise your decisions and commitments in the light of the changing conditions. And even your goals can change! Don’t lock yourself into a plan based on assumptions just because you paid for it and it’s printed in a fancy binder.
"It is not the strongest of the species that survives; nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change."
– Often attributed to Charles Darwin. However, it’s been definitively debunked. He never said or wrote that. Although, to be sure, he should have…