Our Approach to Wealth Management

It’s all about you

A Personalized, Detailed Approach

Our Process

A Tailored Approach

We offer a personalized, detailed approach to uncovering what wealth means to you and your family by defining your unique wealth plan and what it can do for you. We’ll help you confirm the level of professional expertise and service you require on your journey to build and implement your wealth plan.

1. Listen & Discover

Let us uncover what your wealth actually means to you and your family.

2. Gain Perspective

We understand your wealth and its many implications, opportunities, and solutions and then how to plan for it well.

3. Set & Track Life Goals

We test our thinking for your strategic wealth plan by running financial models of your current and alternative strategies.

4. Assess & Be Committed

We like to meet regularly to assess progress toward your goals, to confirm that we’re on track and to leverage market opportunities.

5. Enjoy

We help achieve outcomes that improve your life and wealth, now and for generations to come.

Investment Strategy

Focus on Counsel

We focus on counseling our clients on how they can best reach their financial goals.

We help our clients make smart decisions about their money. We don’t focus on market trends or make predictions about stock prices or manager performance. We believe that our clients have a better chance of reaching their financial goals if we also minimize costs, manage taxes, and appropriately diversify their investments. Most importantly, we employ a goals-based investment strategy to keep our clients focused on where they want to go and what they can and can’t control along the way.

Our investment philosophy has four core areas–each one designed to help our clients understand how their specific goals relate to their portfolio allocation.

1. Goal Investing - Understanding the rate of return

Before we start implementing any investment strategy, we must come up with a target or a goal. We believe that if you aim at nothing, your chance of achieving your goal will be minimized. We identify goals by providing a detailed analysis of where our clients want to go: what we call a Wealth Itinerary. Once they know where they are going, we can talk about the expected return, the amount of risk they are willing to take along the way, and the probability that they will attain their specific investment goals.

2. Risk Tolerance – Appreciating our clients' risk profile

It is imperative that our clients are emotionally comfortable with the potential risk that is associated with the target rate of return. We prepare our clients so they are able to handle future market volatilities and avoid making an emotional decision at the wrong time. Behavior finance is a critical component of what we do: striving to ensure short-term reactions don’t interfere with a long-term investment strategy.

3. Portfolio Diversification – Balancing risk & opportunity

Fundamentally, we believe that capital markets work and that throughout history, investors have been rewarded for the calculated risks they take with their capital. We agree that stocks are more risky than bonds and have greater expected returns. We also hold that the relative performance among stocks is determined largely by size (small vs. large), price (value vs. growth), and profitability. The relative performance of bonds is driven largely by credit quality and the term of the loan. Because we can’t rely on costly speculation or market timing, we strategically allocate investments in small, large, value, and growth stocks around the world. For bonds, we use term and credit characteristics to target the risk exposure.

In order to implement this strategy, Wealth Design carefully selects investment partners (DFA Funds, Vanguard ETFs, PIMCO ETFs, etc.) whose strategies for mutual funds and ETFs do not involve active stock picking or investing blindly in commercial indices. Using these low-cost instruments, we structure client portfolios with a broad exposure to a range of asset classes that are most appropriate for their individual goals, time horizon and tolerance for risk.

4. Management Efficiency – Transparency, lower costs, & tax efficiencies

Most active managers don’t pay enough attention to the costs and tax implications of their trades and fees. Index fund managers are forced to pay trading costs whenever their benchmark changes its composition. In both cases, the investor pays these tracking costs in reduced performance. Because strategic investing focuses on broad factors rather than a specific list of securities, taking additional risk allows us to help reduce costs by being patient and waiting for trading opportunities that add value.