Information: Services
What investment services will you provide me?
Services I provide for individual private clients fall into three broad categories:
Phase One: Financial Planning Services
- Process following the CFP® Board’s 7-Step process and fiduciary guidelines.
- Organizing your current investment and insurance information to help you understand how they interrelate and to identify your current needs.
- Setting long-term goals and intermediate-term objectives and prioritizing what’s important to you.
- Identifying available strategies for wealth accumulation, preservation, distribution, and legacy strategies.
- How/when it’s best for you to begin taking Social Security
- Identifying the most efficient ways of arranging assets in order to reduce risk, taxes, and investment costs.
- Plans are continually updated and reviews are arranged according to a schedule convenient for you.
Phase Two: Investment Advisory Services
- At the end of your financial plan I will create an Investment Policy Statement (IPS) for your review.
- I will also tailor, for your approval, the selection of the investment puzzle pieces that meets your needs, including providers for investment due-diligence, asset custody (I do not take custody of your assets at any time), investments including ETFs, mutual funds, and institutional wrap-fee programs for investment management and reporting.
- If you are a conservative investor, you may be happy to know I do not provide advisory services regarding private placements, limited partnerships, or initial public offerings (IPOs). I do provide access to institutional money managers and various wrap-free programs including third party money managers and investment models, if you should so desire and where appropriate.
Phase Three: Financial Plan and Investment Plan Reviews:
Reviews will be conducted on a schedule appropriate and convenient for you. In addition, you will have 24/7/365 direct access to your financial plan and investment accounts. In addition, your financial plan will be automatically updated daily to reflect any changes in value for the assets you’ve placed through my services.
Life Insurance
This area generally comes into play for legacy, estate, wealth replacement protection, charitable giving and tax-advantaged/supplemental retirement strategies.
More Information
Free and simple tools are available to research firms and financial professionals at http://investor.gov/crs, which also provides educational materials about brokers, investment advisors, and investing. Unfortunately, the videos seem to convey the impression that all “advisors” are brokers and investment advice is the only service offered and never considers financial planning, how registered investment advisors differ from brokers, and other technical services as part of the value mix.
The fiduciary standard has been ‘watered-down’ as of late; however, I routinely offer my clients a written and signed Fiduciary Oath.
Jim
