Investment planning is often an important part of achieving a financial goal.  We believe that having a personalized investment strategy is critical to success.  Having a strategy helps you weather the storm when problems strike the markets.  Your investment strategy will be built on these principles.

• The investments in your portfolio should be appropriate for your goals, the length of time until the funds are needed and your risk tolerance.  If you need to achieve an eight-percent rate of return to meet a goal, we believe it is not prudent to seek a fifteen percent return at a higher risk.

• Managing the volatility or the ups and downs of your portfolio is important.  Oftentimes, too much volatility will "scare" an investor into abandoning their strategy at the worst possible time.  One way to attempt to manage volatility is to spread money among different types of investments or to diversify.  You should not have all your eggs in one basket.  We believe it is important for you to sleep at night without worrying about your investments.

• Diversification means that some individual investments may do poorly while others are performing well.  The important criteria is the total portfolio return and how it works, not the success of any one individual portion of your investments. 

• Taxes and fees are significant costs of investing, and are in some measure under your control.  We attempt to build porfolios to minimize these costs while meeting your needs.

• For most clients we favor using no-load mutual funds and/or exchange traded funds.  These investments help keep fees lower and let us have more control over taxes.

• We encourage patience and avoid rapid-fire trading.  Very few investors can accurately time the market over any sustained length of time.

• You should understand your investments so that you can explain them to someone else.  It is our job to educate you on your strategy so that you can do that.

Working with you, we develop a personalized investment policy statement stating the guidelines used to build your portfolio.  Follow this link to see a sample policy.