Navigating Your Journey

We believe that the foundation for every client portfolio is understanding how that portfolio will be used.

Retirement assets have a different time horizon than assets saved to fund college or assets to buy the retirement dream home. We want to understand you, your dreams and fears and we also want to get to know those you love. It’s the personal part of financial planning that brings meaning to what we do.

As far as our investment philosophy, we believe that it is “time in the market” versus “timing” the market that determines investment success. This means after carefully understanding your goals, resources, life stage and near term expected life transitions, that we will determine a mix of different types of stocks (Large/Small/US/International), bonds (debt of companies and governments, including tax-free municipal bonds where appropriate), and money market funds to meet your needs. Generally speaking, this will include cash reserves, income producing securities and growth oriented investments.

Our investment philosophy is shaped by the investment research put forth by Dimensional Fund Advisors. The foundation of our approach is to focus on what we and you can control. If you work with us, you’ll hear this a lot. We pay careful attention to taxes (especially how to minimize them), fees, overall risk levels and spending and saving.

Our bottom line is this: equity markets have historically offered the highest returns BUT only if you can stay invested. The pain of losses impacts each investor differently. Ultimately, your goldilocks allocation or risk-level is one you can stay with in negative markets and still sleep at night AND one you don’t experience too much FOMO or fear of missing out when markets are rising. We also believe it’s important to have cash on hand for expenses expected in the next year to eighteen months, and sometimes people need more cash reserves to feel comfortable and that’s okay too!

In our years of financial planning, we’ve never had a client miss a retirement paycheck. In good years, we might encourage you to take the extra trip, replace the old car, do the kitchen remodel. In bad years, we will advise you to cut back on big ticket purchases where possible. At the end of the day, we will partner with you to navigate the ups and downs of the markets, and life.