Grow Your Wealth. Secure Your Financial Independence.
Focus on the Essentials. We’ll Help You Manage the Rest.
Growing and preserving your wealth is crucial to securing your path to financial independence. When it comes to investing, there are things you can and can’t control. A trusted Pittsburgh fiduciary investment manager can help you manage what those things that count, so you can focus your time and energy on people and passions that are essential in your life.
Investment Management that Adds Value
Economic downturns, social unrest, geopolitical uncertainties, and many other factors can influence the direction of financial markets in one direction or another. And many individuals who have tried to go it alone and time the markets in anticipation of such events have experienced less than desirable investment outcomes.
Time and again, experience shows that time in the market, rather than timing the market, is the surest path to growing and preserving wealth.
That’s why we believe that the core of securing your path to financial independence is focusing on what you can control, and that’s having a disciplined investment strategy aimed at growing your wealth and helping you navigate periods of heightened market volatility.
Our investment philosophy centers around a disciplined approach to asset diversification. To this end, we utilize a Strategic Asset Allocation framework custom-tailored to your unique risk, goals, and objectives. This approach involves building your portfolio to include a global mix of stocks and bonds of small and large companies from developed and international economies.
What Makes Us Different
When you work with us, what you’ll hear us talk about a lot is our process. Certainly, we daily stay on top of the markets and talk to our clients about what’s happening in the economy and markets regularly. Our focus, however, is bringing your attention back from the headlines to what matters most as it relates to preserving and growing your wealth for long-term financial independence mastery.
Undoubtedly, at every step in the process, we ensure that your overall investment strategy agrees with your plan for financial independence. And when it comes to your equity compensation or concentrated stock holdings, we tailor our approach to help you diversify your holdings with consideration for various costs and tax consequences.
Overall, our open-architecture approach ensures that your portfolio holds low-cost, tax-efficient, and best-in-class assets rather than proprietary securities. And as a fiduciary, we do not receive compensation from third parties for the investment recommendations we make in your portfolio.
Here are some ways we add value to our investment relationships:
Diversification and Risk Management: Our portfolios include global exposure to stocks and bonds and US and international assets from large and small companies. Allocations to these various asset classes are aligned according to an investment policy we prepare with you based on your risk preference, income needs, savings goals, and overall lifestyle preferences.
Asset Location: Ensuring that suitable investments are held in the appropriate accounts is essential to growing your wealth efficiently. That’s why we’ll help you ensure that we’re buying assets in the proper accounts so that when the time comes to begin drawing down on your savings, you’ll pay no more tax than necessary. Some studies have shown that this approach can add up to 0.75% annually to your investment portfolio.
Low-Cost Investments: Our approach uses low-cost, tax-efficient, best-in-class ETFs to build your portfolio. ETFs typically trade without any transaction fees.
Fee-Only Advisor: Our clients compensate us directly for our time and services. We do not receive commissions or other compensation from security or product sales. And we do not have hidden costs, like wrap fees.
Tax-Efficient Investing: Investment decisions are made through the lens of tax efficiency. Beyond security selection, we consider your current financial situation when it comes to the timing of asset purchases and sales and as your equity compensation vests.
Tax Loss Harvesting: Market selloffs aren’t always a bad thing. Those are times when we can use a market downturn to help offset accumulated tax liabilities in your portfolio. Some suggest that this approach could add 0.20% – 0.60% annually to your investment portfolio.
Account Rebalancing: The basis of a disciplined investment process is holding a mix of assets that do not move together over the long term. As markets trend higher or lower, your investment allocations may drift from its strategic objective, potentially leading to taking more risk in your portfolio than necessary. That’s why we’ll rebalance your portfolio regularly to help ensure that you’re not taking on too much risk. Some studies have shown that this may add 0.35% – 0.44% annually to your investment portfolio.
An Objective Guide: Many investors cut their bear market losses in February 2008 or March 2020 only to watch from the sidelines as markets rocketed higher a month later. When economic and market volatility keeps you up at night, we’ll bring you back to our disciplined process that drives objective investment decisions and, when necessary, make adjustments to your overall financial plan to help reduce emotionally driven outcomes.
Our Investment Management Fees
Our investment management fees reflect the time, legal, and compliance costs of managing your portfolio. As a fee-only Registered Investment Advisor (RIA), our clients compensate us directly for our time and services. We do not receive commissions or other compensation from security or product sales. And we won’t charge you hidden costs, like wrap fees.
We also integrate financial planning into our investment management fees together. Clients whose assets we manage may see a reduction in their annual financial planning fee. For households where we manage at least $500,000, we may reduce our planning fee by half after the first year. And for those clients with whom we manage over $1,000,000 the monthly planning fee is waived entirely.
Here are some examples of how fees are calculated:
Jess and Chris ask us to manage their investment portfolio valued at $1,000,000. They would pay an annual investment management fee of $11,000. The annual fee is calculated by applying 1.25% to the first $250,000, 1.15% to the next $250,000, and 1.00% to the next $500,000. In this case, the couple would likely not pay a monthly financial planning fee.
In another instance, Rebecca would like us to manage her investment account valued at $500,000, paying an annual investment management fee of $6,000. This fee is deducted from her investment account, and half of her planning fee is waived after the first year.
