As a fiduciary, Gamma Planning has straight-forward pricing for our guidance. There are also cost associated with implementation that we have determined to be reasonable, but are additional cost, nonetheless. What is paid to provider is what you and I do not keep, so I have an incentive to reduce or eliminate these costs when these services do not add value.
If your waiter comes to the table, and you ask them 'what's good?', the answer is going to be 'everything.' Most investment providers, do some things better than others, and other things worse than others. They make long-term investments in their products and will f any way possible for you to ignore the things they don’t do well. GWM has no allegiance, or long-term investment in a strategy prescription. This gives us the ability to be nimble and make changes in recommendations when they no longer serve their purpose.
In 2009, while asset balances decreased, work did not. In fact, there was even more work to be done. You want an advisor that is not apprehensive in picking up your call, because they are more focused on new clients than their existing ones. You want an advisor who will stick around, and a firm with a balanced approach of expanding its reach; allowing it to invest in new improvements, along with one dedicated to working with you during troubling times. Our revenue model allows us to do both.
There are multiple stages of the financial planning process. Very rarely do planning events go as planned in a linear fashion. In most cases, complex written plans can be outdated just as soon as they are completed. Sure, I could just craft you a dissertation, and throw you to the wolves, but at GWM, we do things differently, for six months. Proper, relevant plans take time, so our commitment is to help you through the fact-gathering, and emotions connected to the decisions that are recommended for implementation. When we do create a written plan, it serves as a living document that is at the heart of everything we do; an aspirational document with flexibility for the unexpected events in life which are sure to happen.
Our investment methodology is in agreement that indexing is a low cost, defensive strategy that has worked, and should be a part of an overall strategy. However, larger retail provided index funds have tax-inefficiencies that could be eliminated with our direct-indexing methodology. If you have investments outside a taxed sheltered vehicle, like a 401k or IRA, it can be meaningful. Don’t believe me!? Ask your index fund provider how much unrecognized gains they have within your funds, and what that means to you? What are strategy costs?
First, and foremost GWM has a fiduciary responsibility to place your interest before our own, and this starts with an honest conversation about our capabilities, and ability to meet your needs. Our focus is to foster a high-touch collaborative relationship with our clients, with a focus on an advisor to client ratio that is lower than the industry average. We do this by leveraging technology such as artificial intelligence, to make sure that we are spending most of our time committed to high value interactions with our clients. For instance, once you are a client, you will have the ability to establish an appointment in the future, at any time without endless phone tags, through a link to our calendars which are available 24/7. From an investment standpoint, we are one of the most flexible financial planning firms available. If you intend to keep your current brokerage relationships, we have tools to provide a visualization of your entire portfolio across multiple institutions. If you choose to receive discretionary investment advice, we will manage your accounts through two of the largest brokerage custodians – Charles Schwab and Folio Investments. There are very few investment objectives we cannot accommodate, and if we can’t, we will make sure you find a firm that can!
